"We plan to release the source for ... Ice Cream Sandwich soon" | Hacker News Reader

"We plan to release the source for ... Ice Cream Sandwich soon"

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32 pointsguelo22 comments

Well could you post the news once they did it? This has no useful information content.

"…once it’s available on devices"

Meaning: November. Basically, they won't hold it back like Honeycomb, this isn't a rush job.

Neither is it meaningfully an "open source project" any more, either. They do a lot of work and throw it over the wall. People are welcome to contribute fixes, but no meaningful architecture input flows inwards. I find that sad.

But it's far better than the disaster that was Honeycomb, or the fortess that Apple builds around its developers. But it's not where I personally would have hoped we would be at this point.

Yeah, it's a bit of a letdown in some ways, but... still. Liberally licensed project with tons of source code still isn't doing too bad.

To put a more constructive twist on things, I wonder how Google could achieve their goals and also make Android more 'real' Open Source?

The MeeGo world had a bunch of discussions on this. What ultimately (IMHO) matters to people is simple visibility into the design process. With desktop linux, we get that. We can see Gnome 3 coming and talk about it before it arrives. We can try out a new driver from a development tree. When the occasion arrives, we can grab/test/fix/rework this stuff and know who to push the changes to.

But when these processes and priorities collide with "product strategy" they always lose. Google and its partners want to unveil ICS in a big press conference, not an email message. Samsung wants to show the first ICS phone, and not be one-upped by some geek running a CM9 nightly image on a phone she bought last year. So they delay the source drop and shutter the doors on the git archives. But in so doing they kill off the "project" part of AOSP.

And no, this didn't really work in MeeGo either. I don't know what the answer is, except to decouple the OS vendor from the hardware vendor (i.e. the Red Hat model). But that won't work because apparently no one wants to sell an open consumer electronics device.

Google also does not want device manufacturers to ship pre-release versions of Android just to be first to market. This was apparently a problem with Froyo or Gingerbread.

Google could hold back the sexy UI and application changes and just develop the kernel and foundation libraries in the open. But some of their hardware partners are very secretive and do not want any details leaked about the capabilities of their new hardware that may be revealed in device drivers.

Those are certainly some of the reasons, yes. But my point was more that Google is doing a poor job of managing the conflict between the business interests of its hardware partners and the health of the Android Open Source Project. Basically, AOSP isn't a "project" anymore (if it ever was), and that's sad.

And it's not like this is an impossibility. Red Hat manages to sell RHEL licenses without killing Fedora, for example.

Very interesting question, especially considering what strikes me as the newly singular vision behind ICS. Which also brings it to a new level of quality from what I can tell.

Android's never been "true" open source. I don't think they've ever done major development in the open; definitely not since 2.0 (IIRC, the Droid was on the market before even the SDK and emulator for Eclair, and not even sure if Eclair got a source release before 2.1)

I find the lack of "inflow" to be, as you put, very sad. I understand the need to develop in private and release at their discretion, but there are more than a few features in ICS that were implemented by the CM team already, as well as other things that have been "major" issues in the AOSP build tree that had been sorted out by the CM team and submitted as patches that were ignored. Seems a shame, really. That having been said, I'm sure I will install CM9 when it becomes available for whatever device I wind up with.

They said they would do this months ago, why is it news?

Some people have been trying to one-up each other on cynicism by predicting that Google is lying.

I don't know whether they're lying or not.

I do know that Google has shown they can't be trusted to follow through on their promises of "openness" in the past. I know that the most recent public release of Android (Honeycomb, since ICS isn't out yet) was a closed-source product. I know that they did that for a reason -- controlling which devices end-users can run the software on -- that spits in the face of Freedom Zero. I know that Google's development process is the same one Apple has been flamed to a crisp for in the past (adopt an open-source codebase, do all your development in secret, and maybe chuck a tarball over the fence every so often).

I know that my attitude on Google and "open" nowadays is "I'll believe it when I see it". I know that there's an awful lot of rationalization going on in the minds of people who trusted Google and are now learning that may not have been such a smart idea...

Because they still haven't done it.

ICS was just officially unveiled last night. The SDK has been out less than 24 hours.

Still haven't done it? Seriously?

People don't' like it when you develop your "open" software behind closed doors.

Sure, there are good reasons for it, but so long as you fly that "Open" banner, you're going to get shit when you do things that seem contradictory to that message.

Definitely true. Google want credit for being "open source" but they're not willing to put the effort into actually having an open development process.

I don't know why you're using scare quotes around open source. By every reasonable definition of the term, Android is an open source project.

It may not be RMS style Free software and it may not be a community-driven project, but it is absolutely open source software.

> ICS was just officially unveiled last night.

Android has existed without public source code for much longer than last night.

Google said all along that Honeycomb source wouldn't be released, and that ICS would be the next public code release.

Public code releases have always lagged official announcements by a few weeks.

Google is doing exactly what they said they would and what they've always done. The whining strikes me as a bit silly.

The news is that android.git.kernel.org is back up. I'm not sure why the headline is about Android 4 as that is only briefly mentioned in the post.

Because an accurate headline wouldn't manufacture any controversy.

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