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HTC Finally Releases Hero Source Code

Posted by timothy on from the shouldn't-heroes-be-more-forthcoming? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After months of prodding by developers, HTC has finally released the long-requested Android source code for the HTC Hero. This follows up on a recent report on Slashdot concerning device manufacturer HTC's perceived stonewalling over releasing source code for the device after repeated attempts to initially obtain source were met with vague responses."

6 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:HTC by AnEducatedNegro · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anyone know what kind of custom stuff they're build for Android?

    Sense UI and a few applications. Nothing spectacular, android steals all the glory. In fact, don't waste your time on the HTC Hero.. wait another week and get the Samsung Moment. Faster proc, onscreen keyboard and physical keyboard, better battery life.

    I love my HTC Hero but boy is it slow at times. And I'm not just talking about waiting for an app to load, there are times when the entire device just decides to freeze up for 2-3 seconds while queuing input.

    aEN

  2. Not so bad... by Sarten-X · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm assuming good faith, but personally, I'm not concerned that it took so long to release the source code. Most likely, the developers were under a deadline to have the phone in working order, and had to postpone lower-priority tasks to meet that deadline. These lower-priority tasks were probably such trivial things as comments, changed names, formatting, and all those other bits that get neglected under heavy pressure.

    --
    You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    1. Re:Not so bad... by mevets · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've been in situations that appear like this in companies before. Usually it is stage fright, the developers know they took outrageous short cuts to meet schedules, and don't want to publish it until SP1, when they have had time to remove the hacks and crap. These are the good guys. One company I worked for thought that the source was harder to understand than the (disassembled) binary; they had a point.

      Sometimes I wonder how much of a role of embarrassment plays in the decision to keep the source code private. Happy Launch Day Windows 7!

  3. Re:HTC by delire · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sounds like you need to upgrade the firmware..

    People are reporting huge speedups after doing so.

  4. not android source code by wcoenen · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is not actually about android source code as the summary says. Android source code is distributed under the Apache License, which doesn't require you to "give back" modifications to the open source community. This is just about the GPL-ed part: the linux kernel.

  5. Re:A little unfair... by bushing · · Score: 5, Informative

    A major complication is the fact that today's PDA phones are basically cellular winmodems. [...] In contrast, the humble i300 was literally a cell phone radio bolted to a PalmOS PDA, connected by LITERALLY a serial port.

    [...]As I understand it, a phone running Android (or Windows Mobile, for that matter) is kind of like a PC running Linux under VMware under Windows (or vice-versa).

    This is not true, at least not in the case of the iPhone (which has an Infineon baseband processor connected to a Samsung "Applications Processor" by "LITERALLY a serial port") or the Palm Pre (Qualcomm baseband, TI OMAP AP).

    Qualcomm's product info page for the MSM7201 processor used in the HTC Hero says that it includes "Integrated ARM11 applications processor and ARM9 modem, QDSP4000 and QDSP5000 high-performance digital signal processors (DSP)". It would seem likely that the ARM9 core (in combination with one or both of the DSPs) does all of the modem work; I see no reason to suspect that the ARM11 ever "steals cycles from cpu #1".