Please take the highly opinionated statements below with a grain of
salt. Paul (IMHO) needs to extend/increase his knowledge about Android,
opensource projects as a whole, and the concept of internal reviewing
before release. For those interested in Android, you can start by reading:
http://source.android.com/
Of course there are a number of people that have built Android for your
convenience. Just as you can find many Linux distros or OM software
stacks pre-built for you, the Android binaries are there yet you can
build from sources if you so desire.
I personally think that the Apache license that most of Android is based
on is superior to the GPL. That is a flamebait topic, however, and I
hope we can avoid discussing that point.
Getting back to the original issue, I agree that unless it is related to
the kernel in some way then it should be moved to a more appropriate
mailing list.
Cheers,
Sean
Paul Fertser wrote:
Sean McNeil <[email protected]> writes:
thomasg wrote:
audience. So I read kernel and devel to not have to bother with closed
source android binaries, user reports about distro bugs and so on.
I'd also like to request people stop spreading FUD. Android is not a
closed source project. There is a very small portion of code that is
waiting the release process, but everything you need to build Android
is now (or will be soon) provided in source form.
As a matter of fact, people were exchanging links to the closed source
binaries, you can't deny that.
Moreover, Android definetely was a closed source project (anybody
remember heroic efforts to run armv5 code on armv4?). And your remark
"(or will be soon)" basically suggests that Android is not fully
open-source at the moment.
Furthermore, there's a fine line between "Open Source" and "Free
software". Official android website positions Android like "a software
stack for mobile devices", without a word about freedom. Section "Open
Source Licensing" doesn't say anything about freedom either. Verdict:
the wording of official website suggests that by adopting the term
"open source" instead of "free software" you want to concentrate on
business gains, not on Freedom and Free Software.
Even more, the page at Google Code starts with "Android Market"
description! Is it about software or about marketplace at all? Only
the kernel code can be accessed from there in a sane way (git repo), i
can't see neither links to SDK source, nor links to bugtracker.
"Android Market"? Heh, i'd better go somewhere else! Not because i
am in fear or uncertain, quite the opposite!
