2008/3/28 Stone Mirror <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > there's no community around the Android platform itself
I betcha the other 8,463 current members of this forum would disagree with you. But then, every forum needs a troll, I guess. > It's unclear what this "most of" amounts to. So, no one knows whether > it'll, for instance, include Dalvik or not, or Surface Manager or not. All > we know is that, so far, Google's only released what they had to, and hasn't > actually engaged with the open source community on this "open source" > project in any discernible way. Maybe Dan Morill, or someone like him, would > liketo try to clarify this. > Certainly. I actually talk about this publicly all the time, so quite a few people know. Ironically, I may not have said it on this forum yet, so now's as good a time as any. The short version is that anything we can get the rights to open-source, we will -- and one of the key reasons for the Open Handset Alliance is to make sure we have the rights to open-source everything we need to. If we needed a particular feature to be open sourced, we either built our own or found someone to join the Alliance and contribute their implementation. The entire system will be open-sourced, excluding certain pieces. Things that will be opened include Dalvik, SGL, the libc implementation, the Surface Manager stuff, the Binder, the various frameworks and APIs, the core applications (like the dialer, SMS client, Home screen, etc. but possibly excluding any Google-branded apps like Gmail), the media codecs (including ones for H.264, etc.) and so on. Anything original to us (such as Dalvik) will be Apache 2.0. Anything that has to be another license like GPL/LGPL (such as the kernel, WebKit, and Qemu) is already released. Last I heard, a few things that were derived from other projects, notably the libc implementation, will probably be released under the original BSD license. The "certain pieces" that will remain closed are some corner cases at the device driver level. The engineers on that tell me that in general this will be a similar compromise to situations you frequently see in the 802.11 world, where you have binary-only firmware with an open-source driver. I'm sure someone will now make the inevitable "but device drivers are the most important part!" criticism, but as I said we are aiming to open-source as much as we physically can. The IP for ICs can get pretty convoluted, unfortunately. I can't be more specific than this, because I don't know that much about this level of the system. The reason we haven't released the source yet is primarily logistical. One of the team once said "Android will be the largest open source project in the world". That may or may not be technically true, but I think it eloquently captures the scope of what we're doing. When your project is this large, the simplest questions like governance become a big deal. Dalvik by itself is huge, and so are Binder, SGL, etc. Should we have a single gigantic source tree or split up into multiple smaller projects? Anyone who's ever worked in open source knows that it can take a long time to come to consensus on decisions like that. Once we do, we have to then physically tidy up the source, make sure it builds outside our internal infrastructure, set up a public source repository that can handle the load, and so on. Those are distractions that we can't afford right now since we are working closely with our partners to get the first devices launched. Our plan is that once we reach version 1.0, we will turn our attention to the squishier issues of releasing source. - Dan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Internals" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-internals?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
