On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 12:26 AM, David Turner <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Not really, otherwise there wouldn't be any reason to even try the > open-source thing. > > The reason why everything is not entirely developed in the open source tree > are multiple, but basically boil down to the fact that product development > has a much higher priority at the moment than building a strong and pure > open-source community for the platform. > > However, the latter is still a goal that we strive to achieve, and be sure > we will get there at some point. For example, the open-source donut branch > really reflect the state of our current sources, with a slight delay > compared to the internal tree. > > Also; I know a couple of manufacturers that are using the open-source > Cupcake > sources to build real products; so I disagree with Disconnect's assumption > that the open-source tree is "totally useless" :-). > Leaving aside the procedural/technical problems (inability to reasonably accept patches to anything except master, etc) its still not a project you can contribute to. If cupcake is the version external devs should be working with, are you accepting patches to it? ..no? Only for donut. That makes sense, except the donut tree is almost always broken for anything other than the emulator. (Most recently it was because of proprietary HEADERS. Yes, as in "header files describing an interface but containing no code". Not proprietary libraries, which is bad enough, but headers.) Outside platform devs - who own the device sold specifically for platform dev - are once again in the state where the recommended action is "wait for donut to ship on hardware, then illegally copy the bins off and use those." (It's against the license, no matter how many times google says to do it.) That is hardly an open source community project. Its great that its close to the internal tree, but that is a misleading statement when the internal tree includes a ton of core proprietary bins and libs. (Even the "non-google-experience" version, which could theoretically be public.) lbcoder's big long rosy "how an open source community project can work" message was great, but it has very little bearing on reality in Android. A couple points though: - they avoided gpl like the plague. Just the kernel and bluez, iirc - there is no license requirement to release anything else. (Most similar environments would have used busybox and one of the small libc's as well, but they didn't -- specifically to reduce the amount of source that had to be released.) - the illusion of openness is exactly that - an illusion to make consumers feel fuzzy about it. (and lbcoder, evidently) it's great that the unsupported unmaintained version is mostly open. - hw manufs -always- modify the source to get their specific goals met. look at the different symbian interfaces for example. that's not special to android. - outside collaboration is near zero still, partially due to backlog/workload/procedures (being worked on, mostly by poor jbq) but largely due to the inherently proprietary nature of the trees. If google was committed to the big rosy picture painted in the rest of his message, they could knock out some low-hanging fruit: a gmail client (even just an android-skinned version of the j2me one - no push, no contact sync, etc) and a market client (no-protected-apps). And I'm talking bins, not source so don't get all freaky at me. Those things are entirely under their control and don't interfere with the 'google experience' phones, but they'd bring AOSP vaguely close to every other mobile platform out there.. (m.google.com is a really depressing site if you are an AOSP user. Native apps for everything from maps to contact sync to youtube, for everyone but you.) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
