On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 11:00 PM, Dan Morrill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 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. > No Dan: the *platform, *the Android system itself. The part that you *haven't *released, Surface Manager, Dalvik, the Android libraries themselves (and thanks for being a little clearer around that, I'm pretty sure I've never seen a statement to that effect anywhere previously). I clearly mentioned the two first ones as examples in my email, in fact in the very next paragraph you quote, but I guess it's easier to ignore that and call people names instead. There's a *community *around the Linux operating system; actually several communities, including the kernel community, the GTK+ community, the BlueZ community. There are no equivalent communities (or community) for the Android platform. Maybe there will be someday, or maybe there won't. The open source community at large, historically speaking, *hates *"code dumps" (aka "toss-it-over-the-wall-ware") *especially *extremely huge ones. And I'm not sure it's realistic to expect that the folks currently working on GTK, Gstreamer, PulseAudio, BlueZ, and the like--the *real* open source software community--are going to drop what they're doing to take on Android instead. 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. > As I say, I wonder who you expect is going to be rushing in to take it on for you. Evidently the existing work in the open source community wasn't good enough for Google. It seems to be good enough for Moblin, for Ubuntu Mobile, for the LiMo Foundation and numerous others. LiMo had *eighteen *phones to show at Mobile World Congress. > 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. > Heaven knows, we'd hate to distract you. We'll just keep plugging along on the stuff that actually available now, I guess... -- 鏡石 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
