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Comment by vuanotinn | Hacker News Reader

Looks like all Android-related projects, big or small, high profile or low profile, suffer from the same problem the iOS jailbreak community has: everybody with power or a voice in the community is either a whiny bitch or a brat.

Technical/legal stuff aside, all problems with projects related to the Android OS are all the same: immaturity, lack of responsibility, selfishness, etc.

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The Android open source community is deeply unhealthy, IMHO. Compare the pile of shit that is XDA vs a well run open source project. Most of the stuff posted there has no way to verify the source code, binaries download from sketchy sites, no issue tracker. If you have the stomach to wade through the cesspool of XDA threads, you will find the majorly of posters parroting cargo cult ideas (e.g. wiping battery stats to improve battery life). This is not the way to advance technology.

Personally, I think Google is a lot to blame. They really don't care if Android is an open source platform and they don't foster an open source community building on it. So we have basically a mod scene that hacks binaries and passes around dirty hacks that break on every new release. I don't think the work done by the modders end up going back into the official source repo. So much waste of developer time for no long-term progress.

The biggest problem I see is (and there may be other biggies, but this is the one that has bitten me), is that device support in Android kernels never gets upstreamed to Linux. Not necessarily due to GPL violations, but because even though the device source tree is published, there's no one willing to shepherd the changes upstream (and many vendor changes are low quality, so it would be a lot of work). Typically even a Nexus device is stuck on the specific kernel version that it was released with.

Google is a little better on the kernel side, but in other ways, AOSP is even worse. There's lots of good stuff done in Cyanogen and OmniROM, for example, but there's no way to get stuff into upstream AOSP. Google just pitches something over the wall once a year and ROM developers have to rebase or re-implement their ROM features.

The problem is that Linux's kernel interface isn't stable, so a module written for one kernel release won't work on another, and (AFAIK) they don't do major-minor releases (like PHP,Apache) where, say, the 4.0 kernel is stable and will stay stable for a few years. Rather, 4.1 could introduce braking changes as far as modules go.

And, unlike PCs, most phones don't have standard hardware, so someone kernel modules tend to be closed source and don't have "basic" mode.

As a result, to upgrade to a new Android release someone has to backport all new (kernel) features to old kernels.

If you upstream your drivers then the people who change interfaces also fix the modules that use those interfaces.

The problem is SoC manufacturers that don't want to put in the work to upstream drivers.

>The problem is SoC manufacturers that don't want to put in the work to upstream drivers.

They don't _open source_ their drivers.

Many (most?) of them do open source their drivers. But even then, no one is willing to do the work to upstream them.

Really? Where is the full Samsung blobless kernel?

They sometimes release the driver blobs so you don't have to rip them off the device, but rarely have I heard of drivers being open sourced outside of a few scattered instances.

Yep. It's the same in the Minecraft community. Perhaps not to the degree that it once was, but for a while the Tekkit dispute was a big deal, and people like FlowerChild continue to stir the pot of controversy to this day.

The modded community has largely matured, with the vast majority of mods being open source and open to contribution these days.

Personally, I haven't heard from FlowerChild in 4+ years. Somebody did start a mod-friendly rewrite of BetterThanWolves though, built on Forge and with compatibility in mind. It's called Better With Mods.

https://github.com/BeetoGuy/BetterWithMods

AFAICT, he's still around (although I haven't checked in a while). He hasn't talked to the forge folks, though, so nobody cares.

Unless he's left the scene, we can assume that he merely continues to spread his particular brand of poison in his corner of the internet, rarely venturing into the wider community.

But yes, the modding scene is better than it was. Thanks to FTB (as well as Tekkit cleaning up their act), the modpack controversy is mostly a thing of the past. And thanks to King_Lemming, Pahimar, Azanor, SpaceToad, and the rest of the major players in the scene, closed-source mods are very nearly a thing of the past (but not quite).

Unfortunately Azanor's Thaumcraft is closed-source, so not a great example. King_Lemming (and the COFH team) have historically been closed-source as well, but they recently moved to visible source (sadly, probably due to leaving the scene).

Those are the major exceptions though. Mekanism, EnderIO, Forestry, really all the other big mods are completely open source now. There's been a big shift in attitudes on that topic.

For contrast, when I first got into modding nearly all the mods were closed-source. IC2, RedPower, Equivalent Exchange, Railcraft, and so on. Very glad to have seen this ethos shift.

Crap. I forgot that Azanor wasn't OS. I can never keep track. And you're right about COFH (although they were always notably ambivalent about people looking at their code).

But yes, that was my point. Even BC and IC2 (which, while not as prominent as they were, are still giants, with BC still being the bedrock of the modding community) are OS, IIRC (although as demonstrated by the above example, my memory isn't the best).

I mostly see mods from a user's perspective, though, because I can't actually stand Java.

feels like the old warez dayz

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