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It’s official, no more waiting, no more secret SDKs and top-secret government handshakes (ok, there never really was), but it’s still nice to hear that Google has officially Open Sourced Android.
The preferred licensing for working with the Android platform is the Apache 2.0 license. For folks wanting to contribute directly to the platform you will need to complete and send in a signed Individual Contributor License Grant and for corporations that are assigning people to work with and contribute to the Android project, they must complete the Corporate Contributor License Grant; I imagine this is very similar to how the Eclipse Foundation works as well.
Thanks goes to Iliyan Malchev, from the Android team for sending this news in.
AUTHOR’S ASIDE:
I’ll be curious to see if the Android platform suffers some of the same issues that the Eclipse projects do with commercial interests backing most all of the subprojects under the Eclipse umbrella; more specifically, that none of these commercial entities truly want the free/open source solutions to compete with their commercial offerings of the same family. So every project provides built-in conflicts of interest right out of the gate. Do you really think BEA wants the WebTools project to be a completely bug-free and viable replacement for WebLogic Workshop? God no, nor should they really. I don’t think it’s fair to ask a company to spend millions a year on R&D just to give it away… warm-fuzzies aside, that’s hardly a 1:1 arrangement.
In that same vein I’ll be very curious in a few years how Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, etc. treat the Android platform if they have comitter status. Will their touch-screen contributions and Google Map integrations be sub-par on purpose so their own commercial offerings on their devices will be the real shining stars instead of releasing all that code for free for every competitor to use? Probably not.
Another interesting bit to consider is how involved with Google and/or the Open Handset Alliance be with monitoring the health of sub-projects under the Android umbrella? If, for example, Sprint charters a Voice Command API for the Android platform, makes an initial release and lets the project lag but other’s of the alliance begin to adopt that work and integrate it into their offerings for their devices, will Google step in and ask Sprint to continue work on that project now that it’s become a Level-2 dependency for so many other commercial offerings?
I’m not sure, but I’d be curious to know.
For folks wanting to get their hands dirty ASAP, here are the important links:
- Google Code Project Page
- Download the Source
- Documentation
- Mailing Lists
- Report Bugs
- Code Reviews / Patch History
NOTE: Looks like Android uses Linus’s Git source control system. I have to assume that is because of the talk Linus gave about Git at Google in May of 2007. It’s pretty interesting if you like technical detail like source control repos.
If you are new to Android and never done anything with it, a good place to start before grabbing the source might be perusing the Project Layout page to understand how things are organized in the repository so you can focus your point of interest into the actual project you want to work with.
Additionally to get an idea of where the Android project is going in the nearer term up to Q1 2009, check out the Roadmap page.
Update #1: Google celebrates the Android announcement.
Full Announcement
Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community. All of the work that we’ve poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project.
You’ll be hearing a lot about Android devices. We’ve all put a lot of effort into the first Android device, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. But one device is just the beginning.
Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.
Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.
Have a great idea for a new feature? Add it! As an open source project, the best part is that anyone can contribute to Android and influence its direction. And if the platform becomes as ubiquitous as I hope it will, you may end up influencing the future of mobile devices as a whole.
This is an exciting time for Android, and we’re just getting started. It takes a lot of work to keep up with the changes in the mobile industry. But we want to do more than just keep up; we want to lead the way, to try things out, to add the new features that everyone else is scrambling to keep up with. But we can’t do it without your help.
What will you do with Android?
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October 21st, 2008 at 10:47 am
Bye bye Windows Mobile…
October 21st, 2008 at 11:28 am
Let’s hope… with Windows Mobile 7 getting pushed until next year I have to imagine that will give Android a nice multi-month lead to find it’s feet.
I don’t expect a 1.0 release of anything to nail everything on the head, but given the momentum behind the project and resources, I certainly think they can go from “OK” to “Awesome” pretty quickly.
October 21st, 2008 at 12:19 pm
To suggest that a company would purposely leave bugs in an Eclipse project to support their commercial offering is a far stretch. If that were the case then Eclipse wouldn’t have the millions of users or a reputation for high quality. I can tell you that WTP is one of the most popular projects are Eclipse.
I do agree that companies in the Eclipse ecosystem build value added products on top of Eclipse projects. We actually think that is goodness and creates a vibrant ecosystem. I am pretty sure Google would like to see the same for Android.
Ian Skerrett
Eclipse Foundation
October 21st, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Ian,
I appreciate the followup. I realize my original post may have sounded flip, let me clarify:
These companies spend a small fortune funding development efforts internally, whether it be R&D or core development (like bug fixes). When they propose a new project and become the leading and directing voice of that project, the employees that are assigned to that project have to walk a fine line between making the project valuable to the community and keeping the company’s best interests at heart. The project has to be good enough to service the community, but not *so* good that it completely degrades the value of the commercial offering. I’m sure every single company contributing to Eclipse walks this line every day.
Because of this conflict of interest, I think either knowingly or unknowingly there are either bugs left in or features left on TODO lists indefinitely for the sole purpose that the host company doesn’t want to pay to have their feature set chewed away.
I’m not saying anything sinister is going on, just the reality of the situation of having commercial companies lead their own open source projects that (to some degree) compete with their own commercial tools.
Eclipse never had to deliver the moon to be successful, it just had to deliver something between garbage and top-level commercial offers… for *free* to get the communities attention. Creating the Foundation to pull in the monetary interests of big companies was brilliant for the longevity of the project. I really don’t see how else Eclipse could have grown as fast as it did or survive as long as it will if it hadn’t been for that decision.
I think the fact that Android is following a similar model speaks to how well it worked. Pure Open Source can’t solve a lot of problems and pure closed source can’t solve a lot of problems… but existing in this mish-mash gray area is an awesome consolidation of the strengths of both sides… but you also get some of the weaknesses from those sides mixed in as well (like what I mentioned above).
So back to the Android issue, I think when you look at companies like Motorola, Spring, T-Mo, etc. that all have billions of dollars invested in R&D in both software but more specifically have a huge revenue stream coming from *services* in the future years, thinking that Company X might charter and deliver a shoddy GPS/Maps component or a sub-optimal media player to the base Android platform so their commercial offering still shines is not outlandish.