Measuring Openness In Open Source Projects

suy writes "Several open source projects exist under a variety of licenses, and we qualify them as free/open source depending on the license under which the final product is released. But there are other considerations, like the existence of a public roadmap, participation in the decision making, or access to the latest source code to make contributions. Vision Mobile has published a report that compares and measures the openness of several open source projects: Android, Eclipse, Linux, MeeGo, Mozilla, Qt, Symbian (till the existence of the Foundation) and WebKit. Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest." A related article about the report asks whether open source needs corporate backing to truly succeed.

Comments

Openness

[zget]

Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest.

It's no really a wonder Android scored the lowest. Google isn't truly a open source company, they only give out source when it suits them and even then they regain most control of it with no discussion or decisions with other non-google developers. Most of their products are also either so crippled (Chronium) or limited by other means (Android and HW makers drivers) that they're practically unusable for real use or development.

One of the strongest selling point of open source is that you can make a little change or fix yourself if you feel the need to. Since Chronium isn't truly the source code of Chrome you have to give up lots of other things if you want to make that change. For making a small change it would probably be better to disassembly Chrome and make the change in ASM. Android is basically useless to you if you want to make a change since you cannot run it on your phone. It's nice and all that they provide code (even with stripped parts), but there is no practical use for it. Besides, most of their products are closed source just like their competitors. There's a really insightful and interesting post here about Google's practices.

Re:Openness

[beelsebob]

Yep, and yet somehow people still scream about how open Android is and how locked down iOS is.

Re:Openness

[walshy007]

Android is basically useless to you if you want to make a change since you cannot run it on your phone.

Tell that to the masses of people that have ditched the vendor supplied version of android for customized versions.. it is actually pretty darn common amongst young people. Even non-geeks, all it takes is seeing one extra feature they like to convince and having a half hour of spare time.

Re:Openness

[tlhIngan]

Android is most absolutely not closed-source like its competitors.

Do not confusion Android with AOSP. They are two separate versions. Android is commercially licensed (+GPL2 Linux), while AOSP is Apache with GPL2 for the Linux kernel. And getting Android does take money - you have to be in the OHA (so there is a licensing fee, but it's relatively small and it's not per-unit, but an annual one).

Periodically, Google pushes code from Android into AOSP.

OHA members get access to the latest versions of the Android code before release, but they also have to agree to conditions to use that code, conditions not present in AOSP, such as support for 18 months (no more release and forget - Google's demanding 18 months of support and updates), less fancy dressings and customizations, and unlockable bootloaders.

OHA members do this so they can also license (separately) "with Google" because Android phones are relatively useless without the Market app because there are few alternate sources that have a comprehensive selection of apps. (Hell, most "free" apps rarely put up an apk for download - just a QR code to grab it through the marketplace).

And Archos is also a member of the OHA now - they have to be in roder to release a 3.x tablet. Only OHA members have access to Honeycomb source, and while there are hacked versions of Honeycomb around, I wouldn't trust them in a production product. Though, whether or not Archos abides by their open-bootloader thing, that's another issue. Historically Archos devices auto-lock to the hard drive (so you can't replace it), and have signed bootloaders and kernel, which also check for signed user spaces. Archos Androids were "open" in they could run apps, any roots and jailbreaks lasted until the next reboot.

AOSP may be open source, but it's more like "let's just dump what we have" moreso than a true open-source project - the stuff goes from Android -> AOSP typically.

Re:Openness

[phantomfive]

Honeycomb, of course, isn't OSS ATM, but again, they have good reasons for that.

There really isn't a good reason. If your code is good enough to sell on a device, it's good enough to be opened.

A lot of Android fanboys do logical loops explaining that Android is truly open, and some parts of it are, but a lot of it isn't. Accept it.

Re:Open Source has nothing to do with openness

[beelsebob]

Uhhh, no... "Open Source" is not a license – it's an idea. There are many licenses that are written with the idea in mind. The idea is *everything* to do with openness.