Thanks for the explanation Dan. Dan Morrill wrote: > > 2008/3/28 Stone Mirror <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:[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 > > > >
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