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Android 4.0 Source Code Coming "Soon"
itwbennett writes "Good news today for those of you who have been waiting for news about whether Google would be opening up the ICS source and for those of you who thought it was gone for good. Android engineer Dan Morrill revealed new information in the Android Building Google group yesterday evening, saying that Google plans 'to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it's available on devices.'"
The big question has been, since 'Ice Cream Sandwich', whether it would continue to be closed development/open source, or whether it would go closed entirely, except for a few GPL-obligated kernel bits...
No, that's never been a question for anyone other then the conspiracy minded. Google has been extremely clear and consistent about their reason for not releasing Honeycomb's source and about continuing with the open sourcing of Android as soon as the code base is fixed in ICS.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Don't be taking a holier-than-thou stance and say you're open and the competition is closed though.
Except that they are holier than either Apple or MS -- they are releasing their code base as open source (and not doing anything to stop AOSP-based ROMs).
And here's the thing: even if Google turned around tomorrow and said that they were never going to release any more source code, period, it wouldn't matter: people such as the CM team would continue to develop the existing code, and we'd still have a fully-functional open sourced phone OS running on top of linux. That used to be every geek's dream five years ago, and we've got it in spades. You don't need any closed source (Google) code to run a fully-functional Android system -- the only things you'll miss out on without the Google apps is a native Gmail client (which doesn't matter, as you still get the native email client OSS) and the Market (which doesn't matter because you can side-load apps, and even use a marketplace like GetJar's if you want to have a market interface). There is no way you could claim that iOS or WP7 provide anything like this level of openness or freedom.
To me, that's worth a few brownie points for Google any day, and Android definitely gets my vote in the OS-of-choice awards.
They've said this from the start, but Open Source means you can get the source, and they're not giving the source, which means that an entire release is not Open Source. Maybe every other version of Android is, but those with those devices are running a non-Open-Source version of Android, period, the end. Clear and consistent? Clearly, consistently, not Open Source, until they release the source, at least to their customers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"