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Google Opens Up Android Codebase
rsk writes "It's official: Google has Open Sourced Android. The source code can be downloaded from Android's Git repository. Bugs are handled at the Google Code Android project page with documentation being handled by a collection of Google Site pages. One of the more interesting aspects of Android seems to be the seemingly Eclipse Foundation-like organization of the project, welcoming both Individual and Commercial developers into the Android development pot. One of the benefits of this arrangement is securing the existence of the project by involving commercial interests and their money in the process ... this is also one of the downsides; having commercial entities charter and lead features of a platform that their own commercial offerings provide 'enhanced' versions of, sometimes leaving the free offering always lacking in one obvious way or another. It's hard to say at this point how involved Google will be in this process, or the Open Handset Alliance in general, with managing the health of sub-projects under the Android umbrella as time goes on."
We need to port this thing to all kinds of devices, and would also be nice to port the framework to run natively so you could develop Android apps that would run natively on Linux.
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
When G1 was first introduced, it became painfully clear that it was severely hamstrung by the carrier-dictated limitations on software features.
The Bluetooth stack was totally castrated, leaving out not only tethering and PAN, but also voice features, as well as file transfer.
There are a lot of these glaring omissions in G1s software, that were clearly dictated by T-mobile. My question is this... now that Android has been open-sourced, will Google and T-mobile team up to block 3rd parties from filling in these features? Because as it stands, the G1 actually has less features than the competition, in clear contrast to the wealth of features and freedom of alteration that was touted as the hallmark of the Android platform.
Looking at the misfeatures implemented by Motorola into their phones to inhibit hacking (signing the bootloader, kernel, filesystems) and the frequently missing drivers, it makes me wonder how far one could take the environment released here.
Could you, once built, take the resulting setup and shove it on a G1 and run it? Or are there similar vendor lockouts like those Motorola has implemented?
I'd like to see a tivo-dodge here, but I'm not optimistic.
When will we see a port to the Palm Treo?
And how about a lightweight netbook version?
Or just a light weight GP disto based on Android.
The hard part will probably be the JVM/JIT compiler.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
>having commercial entities charter and lead
>features of a platform that their own commercial
>offerings provide 'enhanced' versions of
Earth to Slashdot... this is how almost every major OSS project runs; people who pay for developers [such as me] will get the features they want.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
One important aspect of being 'open' is whether you favor your customers or the carriers.
I see evidence of this distinction in support for bluetooth API's: the stronger and more customer oriented phone manufacturers support bluetooth API's (which makes many interesting applications possible). On the other hand, when carriers have a stronger role in designing a phone - this comes up particularly for CDMA phones - then the bluetooth API's are dropped or postponed.
So I was quite shocked to see that Android v1.0 does not support bluetooth API's!
I know that Google has claimed that they didn't have time to get the bluetooth API's into v1.0, but that is just the sort of thing that companies will tell us when they change plans due to carrier pressure. The BREW environment (for CDMA phones) has been playing this game for years: continually telling developers that bluetooth support was just around the corner.
I sure hope that Google doesn't play the same game with us. I really want this to be an open and powerful platform.
Got my G1 yesterday. What I've played with so far is pretty nice, the camera is very light sensitive though, so far the only complain I have.
You can install apps from the market, internet or memory card, and the possibilities are endless just with the original OS. Can't wait for some hacked versions of Android so I can really have some fun though.
I'm no developer.
Can someone explain why the source code for a mobile phone's OS would be 2.1 GB?
wtf? How do I emerge that?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
For the end users around here, this doesn't mean much for you.
This does not mean that you'll be able to run whatever version of Android you want on your phone. I would imagine there's very likely situations with code signing involved that ensures that if you're using XYZ's phone, that you'll only be allowed to run the XYZ versions of Android.
This open sourcing does not mean that you simply get to buy an Android phone and then download a version that you want and run that. Not only due to "artificial" reasons such as code signing, but due to hardware features (or lackthereof).
All this really means is that the companies get to have someone else do heavy legwork for them. Beyond that, it means more familiarity with the Android platform which means there's potentially more market for the platform on the bottom line.
More developers means more applications, more applications means more market for Android. Google and the phone carriers are happy. As an end user, you still get a locked down piece of junk--but hey, at least you'll have 50 variants of a card game to buy instead of 40.
I'd be surprised if some of the code-signing stuff wasn't gone soon.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
It's so ironic that the same day Google releases one of the largest and most impactful open source projects, Microsoft declares the day "Global Anti-Piracy Day". Horray for Google -- thanks for making our cell phones more powerful at as low a cost to the user as possible. Now if only there were more free and open carriers around....
Unless mankind redesigns itself
"To build the Android files in a Mac OS environment, you need an Intel/x86 machine. The Android build system and tools do not support the obsolete PowerPC architecture."
quite the burn there
Come on, I don't think this phone does enough yet. If they can't make a phone that can run SETI@Home while I play Duke Nukem Forever, then I'm not interested!
And there's no word on its ability to make my dinner, either. What good is a cell phone if it can't deep fry?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Google announced quite clearly before the launch that due to coding deadlines the phone would be issued with a limited Bluetooth stack and full features would be added later, and user developers were welcome to make their own solutions in the meantime...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
No, carriers want strict control over *your* and *my* devices. You know, the ones we either paid up front for, or the ones we paid out subsidized by our contract.
This bothers me quite a bit.
They only have a kill switch for apps installed through the App Market. It's trivial to install an unkillable app otherwise.
Open hardware is available out there.
I recently bought one, and so far I find the hardware quire acceptable.
I want my General Purpose computer to be able to fit in my pocket, run whatever programs I want, and be able to make phone calls. Why is that hard or unreasonable?