Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 5th Apr 2011 22:48 UTC
Is Android still open now that Google has postponed the source code release of Honeycomb, version 3.0 of the mobile operating system? I've been reading a whole boatload of articles and blog posts on the web claiming Android is no longer open, but it seems like very few people seem to actually understand what 'open' really means when it comes to the GPL and the Apache license. Here's a short primer.
Thread beginning with comment 469272
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Android 2.3.3 is the current stuff, for phones. Honeycomb is for tablets. My guess is the Honeycomb was more or less prematurely pushed out the door to some hardware venders to make them ship Android 3.0 devices before iPad2 was out. It could very well be that the code quality not yet is good enough for a general release in an uncontrolled environment.
Another reason for holding back could be to have some leverage against hardware venders that want to modify the platform in a way that makes it harder to integrate phones and tablets.
If we should believe Andy Rubin the code will get released when they have integrated the phone and tablet versions, i.e. in Ice Cream sandwich. In the long run this may not be a bad thing. I think we should wait and see what happens in the future before blaming Google too hard of not being in the FOSS spirit.