Less Than 80% of Android Code Will Be Open to Developers
Written by AndroidGuys • May 22nd, 2008 • Category: Developer News, Google News, Leaks, Rumors, and Hacks, Recent NewsAndy Rubin, head of Google’s Android project and co-founder has revealed how much of Android’s code will be open source after the first Android phones are launched. Out of the 11 million total lines, 8.6 million lines will be open for developers to take advantage of.
We can’t say for sure how the open source community will take this news. If they react the way we expect them too, it will likely draw the dividing wedge a little deeper . There are plenty out there who will want the whole 11 million to be open. One has to wonder what the other 2.4 million lines have or why they’ll remain closed off.
Now we’re not the experts here. None of us are developers or open source experts. Rather, we are more or less fans and advocates of Android. Here’s where we are counting on you, the developers to shed some light on the subject.
You tell us - How do you feel about the code not being 100% open? Further, if any of you know what might be restricted, we’d like to hear about it.
UPDATE: For some reason, comments were not enabled on this post so we fixed it. Also, Zach from HelloAndroid clears this up for us…
Andy says “about 8.6 million lines of Android’s 11 million are open-source”, and I think he means that about 8.6 million lines of code in Android are ALREADY open source. There are many open source projects that are incorporated into the android framework and these projects are what he is referring to. The remaining 2.5 million lines of code are Android specific code and will be released after the handsets are available.
Also, I should mention that some licenses require that you release all modifications you make to it’s source code, so Google has complied with these licenses by releasing lots of the projects at http://code.google.com/p/android/downloads/list
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The original story unfortunately didn’t include a few details. We currently have 11 million lines of code in Android’s source code repository; however, 2.4 million of those lines are not technically part of Android. For instance, some of it is code for partners, some of it is the source code for our Google-branded applications that are not part of the core Android system, and some of it is incidental code that won’t be shipping at all.
The best way to phrase this is that Android will release *at least* 8.6 million lines of code, and that does include all the interesting parts of the system. The remaining 2.4 million lines are not particularly interesting to third parties.
Hi there,
Well I’m an’ Android developer here, not a kernel developer. Hence I can not make any gud use of the android linux code which were released.
However regarding the remaining unrelease codes, there’s gud reason doing so. It’s like Microsoft going to release 100% of their Vista codes before release; that’s the most stupid thing to do (even for an open source comunity), so it make more sense that it will release after the 1st physical phone arrived.
by Avatar Ng
If you have a piece of software you have developed, you wait till you put the whole package online. I see no reason to publish source code before the project is finished and online. The same applies for a device. I see no reason to publish source code before the device is available on the market. If a company releases source code before the project is either finished or available, it’s a plus to the developing community.