Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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.
wtf? How do I emerge that?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
"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
It's extremely well documented:
ADD FUNCTION
Created by KSP on the morning of the sixth day of the eleventh month of the year one thousand nine hunderd and ninety eight (Gregorian calendar)
*/
This function takes 2 integers, by value, and adds them up, returning the result as one number!
*/
int add(int a, int b) {
/*Here we start our function*/
/*The line below will be executed when this function is called*/
/*Declare a temporary variable to store the result*/
int c;
/*Initialize it with the value zero (0)*/
c = 0;
/*Doublecheck that c is really zero*/
if (c == 0) {
/*All good so far... */
/*Let's add them up! */
//c = b + a;
/*20080109 - JDS: above line commented out. The calling function CLEARLY wanted to sum up a plus b. NOT the other way around... I'm surrounded by aholes! Sheesh!*/
c = a + b;
} else {
/*DANGER! HERE BE DRAGONS!*/
/*For some reason our temporary variable lost its initial value. Oh my Lord! We need some error handling here. Perhaps we could raise an error, telling whoever called this function that something went berserk. Or maybe we can silently just return zero. I like that! This will certainly be better for the other programmer, after all, he won't have to deal with error catching, etc... Let's make life easier for everybody!!! Actually, I like the number 3 better. Ever since I was a kid, it's been my lucky number. I'll return that! I'm so good, I'm BATMAN!.*/
c = 3;
}
/*Here's where we return the final value...*/
return c;
}