

Android 2.3 Gingerbread source code is being released right now - wmf
http://groups.google.com/group/android-building/browse_thread/thread/91172a81604c8a0

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aaronsw
Why don't the Android people work in public like the Chrome team?

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Xuzz
I don't have an answer, but it really undermines their "openness" argument.

Related question, if someone knows: Does the Android team take patches from
those outside Google? (I know that Chrome does.)

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spot
No the openness argument is that the code is open and it is. It is 100% open
source, Apache and GPL. What this does is _limit_ their openness. You can't
see every line as it's written.

I would guess they do it this way because they work with a lot of unreleased
hardware, and the carriers and manufacturers don't want any leaks.

Lots of programmers prefer to tinker in private and only submit to
repositories after everything is cleaned up and debugged. Others are fine with
exposing every keystroke. In both cases we should be grateful if the end
result contributed to the public good as Free Software.

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Xuzz
Wait, I'm not sure I understand: "the openness argument is that the code is
open and it is" and "this does is limit their openness" -- what do you mean by
that?

Anyway, my point is that you would not call Firefox an open source project if
it was developed internally by Mozilla and just released code every major
release. It's not that I don't think it's good that that they release the
code, it's that they use "open" as an argument when it's only open when it
benefits them -- and not a second before.

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guelo
I think the follow up note might mean that this shouldn't have been front-
paged here at HN, [http://groups.google.com/group/android-
building/browse_frm/t...](http://groups.google.com/group/android-
building/browse_frm/thread/cdc28fe70b173b15)

Stop syncing!

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metachris
I doubt that this shouldn't have been here on HN -- Google knows and
anticipates that all news around Android are being watched closely and heavily
anticipated by a large and tech savvy audience. I'm just not sure what to
think about the current release delay. I have a hard time believing Google
just pushes the code to kernel.org without contributing network infrastructure
and servers... couldn't they easily help out kernel.org if this was just a
technical problem.

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CUViper
Google and HP did recently provide new servers for kernel.org: [http://google-
opensource.blogspot.com/2010/11/objects-in-mir...](http://google-
opensource.blogspot.com/2010/11/objects-in-mirror.html)

