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Android Ice Cream Sandwich Source Released
grcumb writes "Looks like the folks at Google have made good on their promise to release the Android 4.0 source code. Android software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru writes: 'Hi! We just released a bit of code we thought this group might be interested in. Over at our Android Open-Source Project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available. ... This is actually the source code for version 4.0.1 of Android, which is the specific version that will ship on the Galaxy Nexus, the first Android 4.0 device. In the source tree, you will find a device build target named "full_maguro" that you can use to build a system image for Galaxy Nexus. Build configurations for other devices will come later.' "
Once nice side-effect of this is that the revision history for the non-free Honeycomb series is also available, albeit without any release tags.
GitHub provides a friendly interface to view the source without having to use the repo tool and downloading the whole thing, so I'm eagerly waiting for this to get pushed there as well. Shouldn't take long.
https://github.com/android/
Talk to these guys:
http://www.android-x86.org/
When you build off of GPL software you're legally obligated to release the modifications, so yeah, Google releasing a significant portion of Android is not "extra" it is the minimum required by law.
Only if you distribute binaries, which Google never did. Of course, the manufacturers did release binaries, so they did distribute the GPL'ed code from their websites. For example, you could always find Honeycomb's kernel code on the ASUS website.
That's not to say they did not also release some code they did not strictly have to, but since they had promised to do so, changing their mind at this stage would have been willfully misleading consumers and partners.
But they weren't obligated to promise it in the first place.
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Samsung was still legally the distributor, and they did in fact release the GPLv2 licensed code on their website (search for "D710" on https://opensource.samsung.com/index.jsp, for example).
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"To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs," says Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google and head of its Android group. "We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut."
Rubin says that if Google were to open-source the Honeycomb code now, as it has with other versions of Android at similar periods in their development, it couldn't prevent developers from putting the software on phones "and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones."
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Actually, it isn't missing in action. The ICS source tree includes the honeycomb code, even though it isn't tagged... So, technically, it's there.
Well, for starters, Apple used to release all their intrusive changes to KHTML as a single patch, which made it impossible to discern what had changed and therefore "impossible" to integrate back upstream. Google has released the repository itself, with proper change history, of all the code they have been working on. That's quite a big difference, so stop spreading FUD.
The point usually made is that this applies to the android kernel source, which has indeed been promptly released directly to the kernel developers (and for download for anyone who cares). Much more promptly, by the way, than required by the licence.
It does *NOT* apply to the full android system, nor will it ever. Android itself (the various subprojects have separate licences, which I think you'll find, are all proprietary).
Just distributing a linux kernel running distribution does *not* make it GPL.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-on-android-the-linux-fork/9426
Google did release all of Android Honycomb that was GPL'd. In particular the Kernel, and a few other userland tools. However, everything that makes Andrioid Android, and not just another linux distro is licensed under the Apache license which allows for proprietary modifications. This includes the Dalvik VM, the Harmony Java libraries, and the Android APIs. Google was perfectly with the law to not release this code, not to mention the fact that they wrote half of it themselves.
This has already been discussed ad'nausem on Slashdot, so there is no excuse for this misinformation to be moderated up. I swear only idiots that hardly read the site get moderation points anymore.
Android isn't GPL. Its an Apache2 license. Only the Linux kernel is GPL and they have been releasing the source for the kernel mods on time.