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It's not truly open but Android (as a platform) does seem to be moving in the right direction. I'm not an Android OS hacker, but as an outsider, my complaint w

It's not truly open but Android (as a platform) does seem to be moving in the right direction. I'm not an Android OS hacker, but as an outsider, my complaint would be that it is apparently very hard to get AOSP up and running on an off-the-shelf phone today. This is from my personal experience of trying several ROMs on my Galaxy S and finding that many are extremely unstable. It seems like the dev teams have to work very hard to make basic things like phone calls and the GPS work correctly. Even the process of installing a ROM and flashing different bootloaders when you get stuck in a boot loop, etc, just seems wrong. But it's early to be complaining. The OSS revolution on PC hardware didn't happen overnight. We now live in somewhat of a golden age where people can run 100% open software on their PCs, and in a lot of cases it also "Just works". I hope Android continues to mature in that direction such that, eventually, it will be a matter of selecting a distro and installing it on your phone (and getting exactly the behavior you want from your phone). Today you can run a custom ROM, but it is pretty hacky, involving trolling forums and downloading a few zipfiles and hoping they will unpack and run correctly. (And "rooting" your phone.) And it can go horribly wrong (I seem to have damaged the "download mode" on my phone the last time around, but fortunately I've ended up with a stable 2.2 system). In a couple years time, I'm hoping the landscape will look a little more like the Linux/PC world we have now. It may be that we'll have to stop hoping Google will be our benevolent dictator and form an independent Android OSS community, though.

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
Is it moving in the right direction? This is an open source project that hasn't done a code release for the last few versions (covering almost a year) and is tightening the licensing agreements to exert control (and doing so in such a way that anyone who isn't a proper licensee will struggle to compete). Yes they've said that they'll open it up again once Ice Cream Sandwich is out but I'm unconvinced by a company who close off the source as and when it suits them. It feels closer to some sort of "shared source" model than open source. It might be better than the Apple iOS / Microsoft Windows Phone model (though I'm not 100% clear exactly how much better) but it seems to stop a long, long way short of the ideal. EDIT: Sorry, being a bit unclear in what I mean by shared source. I was trying to differentiate between projects than run in a open / collaborative way and those where they just publish the code after the event. I wasn't aware that shared source had already been coined to describe a particular model.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Open-source is strictly about the redistribution license and the right to fork it and less about about anything else. Shared-source (as defined by Microsoft's licenses) is strictly about the right to see the source-code, but not touch it. Free Software is strictly about empowering end-users to make and share derivate works and less about anything else. This has important ramifications - the pure open-source licenses with no other agendas, like the BSD and Apache, do give you unlimited freedom, including the freedom to not release improvements / new versions. Basically if you're not happy, you can take Android 2.x and fork it. As an individual developer, you may not have the resources, time or capacity to do that, but Amazon just did. That's as far from shared-source as you can get btw ;)
  - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
    Sorry, being a bit unclear in what I mean by shared source. I was trying to differentiate between projects than run in a open / collaborative way and those where they just publish the code after the event. I wasn't aware that shared source had already been coined to describe a particular model. But I maintain the gist of my complain - right now you can take Android 2.x and fork it, but you can't take 3.x and fork it. Nothing after that has been opened because Google decided that it didn't suit them. There may be some adherence to open but I feel uneasy about a project that is open when it suits the parent company but not when it doesn't.
    - pgeorgi 15y ago
      2.3.x was released as well (though 2.3.7 is somewhat unofficial/dubious at omapzoom due to the kernel.org downtime)
    - bad_user 15y ago
      Right, I just wanted to make the definitions clear. A product is open-source if it comes with an OSI approved license, which grants you several liberties not available with other license models (like Shared Source from Microsoft). At this point in time Android 2.x is open-source, while 3.x is not. I do agree with you, I am quite sure Google has delayed the release of 3.x because of Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is really not how open-source should work. On the other hand, I still have hope because 2.x is for the moment good enough, the genie is already out of the bottle, and if Google betrays the community in the end, I'm sure there are others willing to pick up 2.x and develop from there.

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago

Is it moving in the right direction? This is an open source project that hasn't done a code release for the last few versions (covering almost a year) and is tightening the licensing agreements to exert control (and doing so in such a way that anyone who isn't a proper licensee will struggle to compete). Yes they've said that they'll open it up again once Ice Cream Sandwich is out but I'm unconvinced by a company who close off the source as and when it suits them. It feels closer to some sort of "shared source" model than open source. It might be better than the Apple iOS / Microsoft Windows Phone model (though I'm not 100% clear exactly how much better) but it seems to stop a long, long way short of the ideal. EDIT: Sorry, being a bit unclear in what I mean by shared source. I was trying to differentiate between projects than run in a open / collaborative way and those where they just publish the code after the event. I wasn't aware that shared source had already been coined to describe a particular model.

bad_user 15y ago
Open-source is strictly about the redistribution license and the right to fork it and less about about anything else. Shared-source (as defined by Microsoft's licenses) is strictly about the right to see the source-code, but not touch it. Free Software is strictly about empowering end-users to make and share derivate works and less about anything else. This has important ramifications - the pure open-source licenses with no other agendas, like the BSD and Apache, do give you unlimited freedom, including the freedom to not release improvements / new versions. Basically if you're not happy, you can take Android 2.x and fork it. As an individual developer, you may not have the resources, time or capacity to do that, but Amazon just did. That's as far from shared-source as you can get btw ;)
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  Sorry, being a bit unclear in what I mean by shared source. I was trying to differentiate between projects than run in a open / collaborative way and those where they just publish the code after the event. I wasn't aware that shared source had already been coined to describe a particular model. But I maintain the gist of my complain - right now you can take Android 2.x and fork it, but you can't take 3.x and fork it. Nothing after that has been opened because Google decided that it didn't suit them. There may be some adherence to open but I feel uneasy about a project that is open when it suits the parent company but not when it doesn't.
  - pgeorgi 15y ago
    2.3.x was released as well (though 2.3.7 is somewhat unofficial/dubious at omapzoom due to the kernel.org downtime)
  - bad_user 15y ago
    Right, I just wanted to make the definitions clear. A product is open-source if it comes with an OSI approved license, which grants you several liberties not available with other license models (like Shared Source from Microsoft). At this point in time Android 2.x is open-source, while 3.x is not. I do agree with you, I am quite sure Google has delayed the release of 3.x because of Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is really not how open-source should work. On the other hand, I still have hope because 2.x is for the moment good enough, the genie is already out of the bottle, and if Google betrays the community in the end, I'm sure there are others willing to pick up 2.x and develop from there.