Slashdot Mirror
Android Honeycomb Will Not Be Open Sourced
At the ongoing Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google today officially announced the next version of Android, named Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as Android 3.1, an "incremental platform release" of Honeycomb.
An anonymous reader writes "In an effort to understand the landscape for developers, Andy Rubin was asked if, since Ice Cream Sandwich would be open, Android 3.0 and/or 3.1 will be granted the same courtesy. Rubin answered definitively in the negative. Honeycomb on its own would not be open, because its phone functionality is very broken. Ice Cream Sandwich will take all of the Honeycomb functionality and open source it alongside code that is much more universally friendly."
hide behind your chosen pseudonym some more feeb
you're completely pathetic
I remember a while ago when Google announced Honeycomb would not be open sourced for the time being. A lot of people on Slashdot were unsurprisingly up in arms and, equally unsurprisingly, for all the wrong reasons. From a FOSS standpoint it's a terrible move on their part, but what many didn't understand was the reasoning:
Android has an extremely vast community of amateurs that create custom builds of AOSP. These are people with little to no coding experience, distributing specialized "ROMs" to an even greater amount of curious users who are barely a shade above the average user. So what would happen if Honeycomb were opened? There'd be a very quick uptake by those users and, given the Tablet oriented state of Honeycomb, a really really bad user experience. As pretty as Honeycomb is, that would have reflected badly on Google -- worse than what many jumping the gun on /. thought when Google initially delayed the source release.
With that in mind, I'm glad that they are deferring the code until Ice Cream Sandwich where it seems they will "do it right."
Google open source is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.
These comments seem very much to indicate that the source code issue, as I think most people expected, is less of a "we don't want people using this code for their purposes" and more of a "we think this code is horrible and don't want anyone laughing at it." That really suggests that, rather than be upset about the lack of open sources, people should be concerned as to why Google felt it reasonable to release software they're reluctant to release sources to because they're embarrassed.
Open source also opens organizations to criticism when they try to push out code that isn’t ready, and I think this is very much a problem for Google with Honeycomb.
That's exactly how I'm reading it too. So it's ok to run this pile of garbage code, but not good enough to look at and quite possibly improve. Does that make it official that Google just doesn't 'get it' when it comes to open source?
Google fell prey to a manufacturer. If I read and understood correctly, the current state of honeycomb was put together to get the XOOM tablet out by its launch date.
During the Android Fireside Chat this afternoon, Google’s Dan Morill explained a bit more about the situation. As the bits and pieces that make up Android 3.1 get added into the next version, and the brand new bits that will come together and make this unifying UI get implemented, it will be appropriate to release Android Source. So, quite definitively, Android for tablets will not be open sourced until it’s been fixed to Google’s standards. There’s little information as to whether or not these, in combination with the new fragmentation initiative, will ensure that current Android 3.0 devices will be brought into the open source times or not. More and more it’s beginning to feel like the Android 3.0 concept was little more than a knee-jerk reaction to have something, even if it’s not a great something, to stay within reach of the competition, with Ice Cream Sandwich being the resolving fix to the mistake.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I'm not well-versed in Android, nor a lawyer, but I do know that if you release anything that uses modified GPL code, you have to release the code under the GPL as well. And I find it hard to believe that Android didn't modify any of the GNU/Linux/whatever code they used. Anyone more knowledgeable in the subject care to comment?
I thought it was a huge, lame excuse when I first heard it, but since then I've been disassembling portions of Honeycomb to see what I can find. Of course you can't tell everything from disassembled binaries, but you can tell the basic organization and function names etc. I give it as my (not so) humble opinion that the Honeycomb codebase may very well be quite scattered and an inexcusable mess.
So now I still think it's a huge lame excuse, but perhaps one with some truth. Android devs in general don't know how to organize their code (though they are good at keeping it bug free).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Before he said any of that, he said you have to understand the nature of git: When they release Ice Cream Sandwich, the Honeycomb source will be in the patch history. What they may not bother to do is to tag the specific commit of Honeycomb.
But once Ice Cream Sandwich is released, I have no idea who the fuck would care about Honeycomb; the only reason would be for a device that had proprietary drivers that never updates to Ice Cream Sandwich, but that could be solved pretty easily by just pinning the kernel release to Honeycomb and taking the rest of ice cream.
All this hand-wringing over Honeycomb is fucking annoying at this point. Get over it.
"The right to do something does not mean doing it is right." William Safire
Then of course this proves that Google is not creating software that is meant to be used by the community. It is creating software for a specific prorpietary hardware manufacture, and then, if other manufacturers behave, will release the code to them. Like Apple, only the kernal/stack is OSS while all the stuff that makes the phone cool to use requires Google blessing. One can't use competing product like would be possible with true OSS software. One can't rework the product to meet end users needs. The phone exists to serve the interests of Google and the mobile provider, just like any average proprietary phone. Sure the Android can be broken in to just like any other phone, but why should this be necessary for an allegedly open phone. And sure Apps can be downloaded from any site, but if google were fully open to open source why would they not want to hast any software that wasn't malicious?
At the end of the day if Android were in fact open source and in fact freely available, none of the Google equivocating would be necessary..
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
http://twitter.com/#!/arubin/status/27808662429
So has his definition changed or have we always been at war with Eastasia?
"Google refuses to release embarrassing code to a world of incompetents who could potentially ruin Android's reputation by shoehorning Honeycomb into devices it was never meant to be shoehorned into". Sometimes openness just needs to take a backseat in order to protect reputation.
Seems like Google doesn't have any problem providing the Motorola's, Samsungs and LG's of the world with this 'embarrassing code' and let them sell half-baked, buggy devides running an OS that nobody can modify or improve with. Apparently 'protecting their reputation' means a lot more to them than user experience for their customers, or being 'open'.
I really don't care the least bit about what Google does with the Honeycomb sourcecode, probably they are right about holding it back because it was a rush job and not pretty to look at. That said, I think we can all safely put the hollow 'Android open, Android free!' nonsense behind us. Android is only open to the manufacturers and carriers, and Google has its priorities with them, not with you who was suckered into buying a tablet running beta software.
I'm still amazed that so many people keep up with this, if I pay $500 for a device that is not explicitly marketed as beta, as a curiosity for the adventurous, I expect it to work as advertised, including the software. If the software is so messy even Google doesn't want you to see it, ffing clean it up and make it better, before selling products based on it.