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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/
Huh? Google was supposed to release source code for Android? Pretty sure that counts as extra.
Of course, by /. standards everyone is supposed to release their source code, so by that standard, yeah Google did what they were supposed to do. On the other hand, anyone who is truly a proponent of freedom should acknowledge that, being Google's project, they are free to do with it as they like. Including not releasing source, if they see fit.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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
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.
But they weren't obligated to promise it in the first place.
If there's some sort of hierarchy it works like:
1) Release nothing, offer service (Google search, Salesforce.com)
2) Distribute dongle-encrypted binaries (Pro Tools, AutoCad)
3) Distribute binaries (Mango, Google Android apps, iOS)
4) Distribute binaries, distribute open source to the open components (Mac OS X)
5) Distribute binaries, distribute source on binary delivery (Android)
6) Maintain public source tree, no one gets the bleeding-edge source before anyone else (Linux kernel)
7) Distribute source with a permissive license (Apache)
And thene there's the various support levels:
1) Fuck you (a lot of software)
2) Check out the forum (Apple level 1)
3) Give us a call and we'll charge you by the hour (Microsoft, enterprise Linux)
4) Submit a ticket but we won't tell you anything after that (Android)
5) Bring the software into the shop and we'll see what we can do with it in 10 minutes, if you live in a city (Apple Genius Bar)
6) Submit a ticket, recruit people to vote on it, post bounties for it, and follow it to resolution (Firefox)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
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.
As a parent, I have learned that while you should not always reward simply "doing what you should", it's very important not to bitch about it when someone does what they should, or what they said they would do.
So, for future reference, the correct response to this announcement of Google releasing the source code to Android 4 is "Good". Saying "Those fuckers, they didn't do it last time" is really not productive in terms of behavior programming.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.