

"We plan to release the source for ... Ice Cream Sandwich soon" - guelo
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-building/IwlEJtE1LsI/WtHcsPkUPMcJ

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Tichy
Well could you post the news once they did it? This has no useful information
content.

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stuartjmoore
"…once it’s available on devices"

Meaning: November. Basically, they won't hold it back like Honeycomb, this
isn't a rush job.

~~~
ajross
Neither is it meaningfully an "open source project" any more, either. They do
a lot of work and throw it over the wall. People are welcome to contribute
fixes, but no meaningful architecture input flows inwards. I find that sad.

But it's far better than the disaster that was Honeycomb, or the fortess that
Apple builds around its developers. But it's not where I personally would have
hoped we would be at this point.

~~~
davidw
Yeah, it's a bit of a letdown in some ways, but... still. Liberally licensed
project with tons of source code still isn't doing too bad.

To put a more constructive twist on things, I wonder how Google could achieve
their goals and also make Android more 'real' Open Source?

~~~
ajross
The MeeGo world had a bunch of discussions on this. What ultimately (IMHO)
matters to people is simple visibility into the design process. With desktop
linux, we get that. We can see Gnome 3 coming and talk about it before it
arrives. We can try out a new driver from a development tree. When the
occasion arrives, we can grab/test/fix/rework this stuff and know who to push
the changes to.

But when these processes and priorities collide with "product strategy" they
always lose. Google and its partners want to unveil ICS in a big press
conference, not an email message. Samsung wants to show the first ICS phone,
and not be one-upped by some geek running a CM9 nightly image on a phone she
bought last year. So they delay the source drop and shutter the doors on the
git archives. But in so doing they kill off the "project" part of AOSP.

And no, this didn't really work in MeeGo either. I don't know what the answer
is, except to decouple the OS vendor from the hardware vendor (i.e. the Red
Hat model). But that won't work because apparently no one wants to sell an
open consumer electronics device.

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cpeterso
Google also does not want device manufacturers to ship pre-release versions of
Android just to be first to market. This was apparently a problem with Froyo
or Gingerbread.

Google could hold back the sexy UI and application changes and just develop
the kernel and foundation libraries in the open. But some of their hardware
partners are very secretive and do not want any details leaked about the
capabilities of their new hardware that may be revealed in device drivers.

~~~
ajross
Those are certainly some of the reasons, yes. But my point was more that
Google is doing a poor job of managing the conflict between the business
interests of its hardware partners and the health of the Android Open Source
Project. Basically, AOSP isn't a "project" anymore (if it ever was), and
that's sad.

And it's not like this is an impossibility. Red Hat manages to sell RHEL
licenses without killing Fedora, for example.

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martythemaniak
They said they would do this months ago, why is it news?

~~~
wmf
Some people have been trying to one-up each other on cynicism by predicting
that Google is lying.

~~~
ubernostrum
I don't know whether they're lying or not.

I do know that Google has shown they can't be trusted to follow through on
their promises of "openness" in the past. I know that the most recent public
release of Android (Honeycomb, since ICS isn't out yet) was a closed-source
product. I know that they did that for a reason -- controlling which devices
end-users can run the software on -- that spits in the face of Freedom Zero. I
know that Google's development process is the same one Apple has been flamed
to a crisp for in the past (adopt an open-source codebase, do all your
development in secret, and maybe chuck a tarball over the fence every so
often).

I know that my attitude on Google and "open" nowadays is "I'll believe it when
I see it". I know that there's an awful lot of rationalization going on in the
minds of people who trusted Google and are now learning that may not have been
such a smart idea...

