Intel Builds On Top of Android, But Hedges On Open-Sourcing Improvements

Barence writes with this news as carried by PC Pro: "Intel claims it is making significant improvements to the multicore performance of Android — but isn't sure if it's willing to share them with the open-source community. Speaking to journalists in London, Intel's mobile chief Mike Bell said that Intel's engineers were making significant improvements to Android's scheduler to improve its multicore performance. 'Android doesn't make as effective use of multicore as it could,' he said. However, when pressed by PC Pro on whether those improvements would be shared with the open-source community and Intel's competitors, Bell remained non-committal. 'Where we are required to give back to open source, we do,' said Bell. 'In cases where it's not required to be open source, I'm going to think about it. I don't like doing R&D for competitors if they're not going to contribute themselves,' said Bell, before adding that 'in general, our philosophy is to give things back.'"

Comments

Re:Altruism vs profit.

[Metabolife]

They're abiding by the terms of the GPL and considering giving more than is required. It's a company, not a charity.

Re:Altruism vs profit.

[Andy Dodd]

Android is a perfect example of this - While the userspace Android stack is open source, the Apache license allows vendors to close the source and not release any modifications.

Pretty much all of them do, except for those working on Google's reference devices (the Nexus series).

Now I can understand closing up your "special sauce" modifications like custom UI skins and additional applications - but these companies close down their HALs and frequently change their HAL interfaces so they differ from the Android standards, making it difficult for those who want to run pure AOSP on a non-Nexus device to do so. There is no benefit to doing this - it only pisses people off if they are unhappy with your skin but are unable to change it.

Samsung is especially bad in this regard - they will find every excuse they can to avoid providing source. For example:
The wifi drivers for the ath6k chip in the Tab 7.0 Plus and Tab 7.7 are apparently dual-licensed (BSD/GPL) by Atheros. Samsung chose BSD - so as a result owners of those devices are stuck with shitty wifi that doesn't work well and can't be fixed.
AT&T released an OTA update to Gingerbread for the Samsung Infuse. Two weeks later, Samsung still had not provided kernel source in compliance with the GPL. At this point, AT&T stopped providing the update due to issues with the touchscreen drivers. A week later, Samsung claimed they did not need to provide source for that release because the update was no longer being provided. This is in conflict with the GPL - Samsung DID provide binaries officially to many users, and they are legally obligated to provide source to those users.

In a manner HIGHLY atypical for them given their corporate history, Sony seems to be the only company in the Android ecosystem that isn't paying lip service to open source. They provided ICS alphas and betas (INCLUDING kernel source) to the community, have provided technical documentation and assistance to the Cyanogenmod team that has been greatly instrumental in bringup of Cyanogenmod on Sony devices, have open-sourced their sensor HAL even when they didn't have to, and actually have a developer relations guy (Karl-Johan Dahlström) that does his job. (As opposed to Samsung's developer relations guy, who just cross-posts to XDA teasing of "awesome things to come" and completely failing to deliver, and tweeting source code release announcements for source code releases that have already been out for a week or more.) It's enough that there's a good chance my next phone will be a Sony despite a historical hatred of them for their past bad behavior in other business areas.