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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.
google: a little bit less evil.
that Google has followed through on releasing the source code. This is awesome news after Honeycomb went MIA as far as source release.
Hopefully that means we will see ICS ported to other devices in the near future, it should be interesting to see how it performs on older devices.
Good to see that ICS is an open source version of Android after the closed-source Honeycomb created that possibility (however unlikely) of other Android versions following suit.
Well here it is,
Just like Google promised, they were quite open about why they didnt release the Honeycomb source (not that it stopped ROM cookers) and that the changes in 3.x would be released in 4.0.
It's nice that a large company actually adheres to its word.
Now how long before CyanogenMod 9 is released.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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/
Come on, we all already know goes into an ice Cream Sandwich. You get two graham crackers, put ice cream between them, and serve with a side of randomly lock up my phone for no reason. Easy.
Yeah! "Cupcake", "Eclair", "Ice Cream", what the hell kind of names are those? Sounds more like something from a dinner menu than a release list!
The OSS movement really needs to take a page from the book of professional companies like Microsoft. They know how to give their product versions classy names, like "Mango". See how much better that is?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The tags aren't necessarily relevant to the outside world, and perhaps provide a little too much insight into the development process.
I once tagged something "shitFinallyFixedNow" at 4AM while working on a final project in school. Needless to say, I didn't push that tag to the professor....
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
People were in fact annoyed that Google didn't contribute back to the kernel and such, but that discussion has died long ago. This isn't exactly the first release of Android's code.
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They had no other choice legally, or else this wouldn't have happened.
Uh, no. First, they never distributed binaries, so they weren't required to release anything.
Second, the parts that *were* required to be released (by the manufacturers, not Google) were in fact released, and you could always get them. They're in the ASUS site, for example.
Thirdly, most of the code that actually makes up Android is Apache2 licensed, which means they are never required to release it - you can use it on proprietary code.
Can I type make install? Or are we still in tivo land?
That's up to the manufacturers, not Google.
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Look, clearly the Android names are working up to something specific. The release that causes the singularity will be named Bacon.
The difference being that Android is Google's project and KHTML is KDE's, with Apple splitting up and making a competing fork with little chance of putting their changes back in the parent tree and Google not doing that. Not really all that funny.
If you have to eat your own dogfood, better that it have a tasty name
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.
IMHO, not good enough to not release the entire platform
How about this for rationale: Its their code and they dont owe you a darn thing.
Seriously, someone comes out with a new semi-revolutionary embedded device OS (revolutionary in that it took the market by storm and is reasonably open / easy to root), and then they release the source for the first several releases. But when they miss one, people act like theyre OWED something. You know what? Go use one of the OTHER open-source phone OSes if you feel so strongly about it.
Seriously, this sense of entitlement bugs the heck out of me. The world doesnt owe you a thing.
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
Funny, when Apple released source code in this manner (big chunks all at once) the open source community was up in arms, claiming they weren't being good open-source citizens.
I actually don't remember anyone significant in the OSS community being up in arms. There were a lot of people on Slashdot, but I'm not really convinced that's the same thing.
Remember when KHTML folks were ranting about Apple's handling of WebKit?
No. I remember when one of the KHTML developers made a comment saying they wished Apple would make things easier to backport into KHTML. I further remember them politely e-mailing the Apple devs about it and then the KHTML team making numerous comments about how nice it was that Apple went out of their way to help even though a lot of the changes were in a direction the KHTML team was not really interested in emulating. I further remember people who weren't KHTML developers ranting loudly and at length in numerous forums and here on Slashdot about how "evil" Apple was and repeatedly making uninformed comments that bordered on libel. Apparently the impression that left still lingers.
Unless Android development opens up, this is more of a "shared source" model than a real "open source" one.
Not really. Until Google distributes the software they are not obligated to share any code and if they feel that the time to market advantage of keeping the code secret until they ship is important, well that's a perfectly reasonable strategy that has been quite common in OSS for a long time. It is a trade off because it discourages some players from contributing to the same project and can limit adoption by some vendors.
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.
OK, here's a thread to post the links to all the haters' comments where they guaranteed that Google had gone Evil and would never release ICS source.
Granted, I full well expect six people will rebuff, stating that since 4.0.1 was released but not 4.0.0 that they were precisely correct and that this is proof of Google's evil intentions.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just like Google promised, they were quite open about why they didnt release the Honeycomb source ...and no it isn't for Honeycomb - The history is there, but the tags aren't. Add tags to match the released devices globally, and all would be well.
I wondered how the slashbots would spin this to make Google evil when they released the source. But I really thought they'd come up with something better than "oh noes, sum tagz is missing!"
Do you even know what tags are? Dude, you've got complete revision history, complete with developers' comments of every change... read 'em and figure out what version you want to grab out of there. It's not like there's any One True Honeycomb version either. There were multiple releases, which in turn were almost certainly modified in various ways by the device vendors.
Considering that Google is under no legal obligation to release Android source at all, complaining when Google only gives you the complete source repository, omitting some tags is like whining that someone gave you free beer and pretzels but some of the salt had fallen off. Cry me a river.
Unless Android development opens up, this is more of a "shared source" model than a real "open source" one.
This comes up every single time. The core Android source code (ie. not including third-party drivers, etc.) is most definitely open source, released under OSI-approved open source licenses. Android *development* is not all that open, as it's all done in-house at Google. This is a different thing than the source being open or not.
Other open source software may use a more open development model, but even then it's still up to the actual core developers what they include or not. If I want to hack up the Firefox source code to do something cool, Mozilla isn't just going to include that in the next release either. Same with Apache software. They might be more willing to look at external contributions than Google is, but it all comes down to how much the owners/managers of the project want to include from other sources. They're free to include as much or as little of your contributions or my contributions as they want.
And, of course, you're free to create your own fork of Android (you could call it "Samdroid" given your name) and allow whatever kind of development you think would be "real" open source. Let us know when you do; it sounds like an intriguing project.
Google are:
- releasing source code to their operating system for free, under no obligation. The Nook Tablet and Color and Kindle Fire are great examples of how this can work against Google - Android devices that make no payment to Google and do not come with access to Google's Android Marketplace, or Google's proprietary apps.
- virtually the only major silicon valley company left (compared to Apple, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon etc) who haven't patent trolled anyone (except in retaliation of course), although they could have, Google still has thousands of patents even though companies like Microsoft have far more, some of them are a lot more important than Apple GUI animation patents. e.g. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/googles-mapreduce-patent-what-does-it-mean-for-hadoop.ars
- been far better at sticking to privacy promises and openness compared to the likes of Facebook
- have entire divisions of their company and features that make no revenue for them (and are not R&D projects in hope of future earnings) but are retained. e.g. Free offline and IMAP/SMTP/POP access to gmail from day one, google docs for personal use (I can open and edit files with no ads anywhere), AOSP, Google chrome/ chromium, google.org
- principled stand on net neutrality
- taking a principled stand and pulling out of China
Somehow Google are still constantly attacked, way more than companies like Apple and Microsoft these days, they deserve some credit. Sure, they are far from the do no evil motto, but these days, doing a lot less evil than other megacorps is still remarkable.
If you put a free website as more evil than a dongle-encryped piece of crap that you pay thousands of dollars for.
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.
The difference being that Android is Google's project and KHTML is KDE's...
Bad comparison. The majority of Android was not developed by Google or Android before being acquired. Dalvik is the main from-scratch component, then there is the (fairly mundane) window manager, and most of the rest was assembling components.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
If you're trying to claim that Apple is as good an open-source citizen as Redhat, then you are drinking some particularly strong kool aid. It sounds good, and I'd be interested in trying some for myself. Wherecan I get it?
Just in case you're merely mistaken, RedHat send an awful lot of stuff upstream, and they always have done. In fact, they don't just send stuff upstream, they employ quite a number of the kernel developers/maintainers full time who do nothing but hack publicly on the entirely open-source kernel.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That's complete crap. Slashdot quoted the KHTML devs OUT OF CONTEXT at the time implying that, but it was false at the time and it's still false. And the majority of responses to the Slashdot article took Apple's "side" in the non-existent war.
The KHTML people kept being bugged by users asking when Apple's changes would be integrated with KHTML. Finally, one of the devs wrote an article explaining the situation - basically that Apple's changes weren't really available in a form that would make them easy to integrate. He didn't criticize Apple, he was simply explaining a technical problem. Apple, remember, didn't simply extend KHTML to make WebKit, they refactored the entire thing.
And that's absolutely fine. Nobody in the Free Software or Open Source movements has any problem with someone taking code, and making modifications to make it more suitable for their own uses. Few developers expect every change to be something they can integrate back into their own code. I can't even begin, to be honest, to comprehend the mentality that says that forks have to be limited in that way, and outside of the occasional prima-donna developer who slaps a GPL or Apache license on some code without thinking about it and then gets all upset when someone uses their code in a way they don't like, I suspect the majority of devs feel the same way.
Now, there is a small community who insist that any forks are bad. That all code has to be contributed to a single project. They're the people who get all upset that there's a GNOME and a KDE because it means "all this effort" is being duplicated. They think Firefox and Chrome should merge. They think that Linux should be given a Win32 API so that people don't have to rewrite all the existing apps for GNU/Linux. Those people are loud, obnoxious, and post to Slashdot, but few of them have ever done any development work in their entire lives.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
They were never evil. They're not MS/Apple. Do you have a short term memory loss? Honeycomb was withheld, and they told people why.
They said basically honeycomb was a bad implementation, they didn't want people to move forward with it, they do want people to move forward on ICS. It's not like a "honeycomb is a goddamn secret!" This has been announced like 500x. It's like a design for a car that they say "this design causes engines to explode" so they don't release the design. Is this a surprise that they then release ICS source? Did you hear them say "ICS is a bad implementation"? No.
That's not a lack of transparency either, they announced this repeatedly.