Google has said it’s not ready to release the source code for its tablet-optimized version of Android, Honeycomb.
Google's Android OS is open by nature. The company puts the source code out there and allows third parties to use it in whatever devices tickle their fancy. However, despite the openness of Android, Google is holding off on sharing the source code for the latest iteration of Android, Android 3.0, because it feels Honeycomb is not yet ready to be altered and customized for different devices.
According to BusinessWeek, the delay in distribution is ‘for the forseeable future,’ and Android Chief Andy Rubin refused to give a time frame of when we can expect the source code to be made public. Rubin says the Android team is working hard to make Honeycomb work on devices other than tablets and explained that this was something that was sacrificed in the rush to get Honeycomb ready on time.
"To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs," says Andy Rubin, "We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut."
Rubin goes on to say that releasing the code now would mean developers would put it on phones and the end result would be a really bad user experience.” “We have no idea if it will even work on phones," BusinessWeek cites Rubin as saying.
Fingers crossed they release it soon. Google often makes the source code available to device manufacturers a little bit earlier, so HTC, Motorola, and a few others already have access to it, but we can't wait to see what wild world of Android developers will do with it. Fingers crossed Google releases it soon so smaller companies and developers can really take a crack at it.
uber fail.
Anyway, I bet that they're waiting until Honeycomb reaches the mobile market, which according to wikipedia, will be this summer. That is, Q3 2011.
:facepalm:
Not a big deal despite what some would like us to believe.
If it supports Wine then it can (if the hardware is fast enough).
What world do you live in where the defining characteristic of a "much better company" is based on whether something is "free and open", or, at least in Google's case "free and pseudo-open"?
Such a ridiculous statement. The only thing they can possibly be given, in regards to "credit", is that they made a product that some people will like, and that they managed to whip up a media-frenzy, and that even more people will swallow the hogwash that is Google's claim that Android, and Honeycomb, are "Open Source".
That is all.
So Android is not open source?
1. GPL/LGPL/Apache/Public Domain licenses: If some evil dick-headed company like Oracle buys google, the community has a right to fork the current source code and create their own version, free of the stupidity being imposed by the owner du jour. This happened to Open Office after Oracle bought Sun, now we have a fork called LibreOffice.
2. The ability to compile your own sources: Google gets a bad rap for privacy, and admittedly, they do collect an awful lot of your personal information, but they always give you the ability to opt-out or not use their service. MS collects as much or more information, and their "proprietary-or-GTFO" business model only serves to cultivate such shady backdoor dealings as NSAKEY, which you cannot opt out of. Atleast if I distrust the Android binaries, I can review them and compile my own.
Hopefully, Ubuntu for ARM will eventually contain the necessary telephony stack to be a smartphone OS that's more in the spirit of FOSS that Android. In the mean time, Android is a far better choice than iOS or WP7, for those who aren't complete tech-illiterate lemmings.
Isn't that what Apple has done?
Cyanogen (of CyanogenMod fame) sums it up pretty well.
or may be its developers are so dumb that they dont know what they developed.