If it not open source, then what about Linux. You seriously need to go for a re education.
Why not keep an open mind instead of assuming you know it all
iPhone users really don't care who owns the OS as long as it works. I find it strange that some android supporters are ignorant of the OS they are supporting & defending
Google is not a charity. They don't do anything without a reason.
http://www.wired.com/business/2010/10/is-android-open/\
Is Android Open?
By Scott Gilbertson
Email Author
10.22.10 6:10 PM
Google is famous in programming circles for redefining words to suit its ideas.
Take “beta,” for example. Most of us take it to mean buggy, pre-release software that’s “mostly working, but still under test.” But Google uses the word to refer to a product that’s ready for general use but is subject to “regular updates and constant feature refinement.”
Now it’s happening again over the term “open.”
Andy Rubin, Google’s Senior Director of Mobile Platforms who oversees Android, gave a similar semantic shuffling to the word “open” in response to a slam by Steve Jobs. The Apple CEO stirred up a hornet’s nest of angry Android developers this week when he suggested, in a lengthy diatribe during an Apple press event, that Google’s mobile operating system was not really “open.”
Rubin responded by sending his first ever tweet, posting the code necessary to download the Android source and compile it on your PC and calling it “the definition of open.”
But whether Android actually qualifies as “open” in the purest sense is up for debate, since downloading and compiling code alone does not make a piece of software open. Bruce Perens, who coined the term “open source” and has been working on its behalf ever since, is suspect of Rubin’s definition.
“The fact that you can check something out and compile it doesn’t mean you have the right to use it,” Perens tells Wired.
In the software world, “open” can be defined around three core traits: a license that insures the code can be modified, reused and distributed; a community development approach; and, most importantly, assurance the user has total freedom over the device and software.
The Android OS is, in strictly legal terms, open source. Android is released under the Apache 2.0 software license, which allows anyone to use, modify and redistribute the code. But while it might meet the letter of the law, Android falls short on the other two points.
It’s the lack of community-based development that Android’s critics say makes it no more “open” than Apple’s locked-down, decidedly not-open iOS model. As Perens says, “most open source projects [include] instant access to changes as they are made … and an open door for anyone to participate.”
Unlike major open source projects like Firefox or the Linux kernel, you can’t see what’s happening behind the scenes with Android, nor can small developers contribute to the project in any meaningful way. Google typically releases major updates to Android at press conferences, not unlike those Apple uses to show off new iPhone features.
Once the code is released, Android developers can download it and do what they want with it, but they have no way of seeing what’s happening behind the scenes every day. If you want to know how Firefox changed last night — however esoteric those changes may be — you can study the changes on the Mozilla site. The same is true of the Linux kernel, Open Office and nearly every other open source project with a website.
It’s not true of Android. While Android may have the legal licensing to qualify as open source, it utterly fails on the equally important issues of transparency and community.
Android basically gives you two options: Accept what Google gives you, or fork the entire codebase. Other than the ability to roll your own version of Android, it’s really no different than iOS, which works on a similar “take what Apple gives you” model.
Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, the Firefox co-creator who is now rumored to be working on a Facebook-branded mobile OS based on Android, chimed in over Twitter. Hewitt says the lack of transparency in the Android development process makes it “no different than iOS to me,” adding, “open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.”
The next day, Hewitt followed up with a blog post clarifying his remarks.
“It kills me to hear the term ‘open’ watered down so much. It bothers me that so many people’s first exposure to the idea of open source is an occasional code drop, and not a vibrant community of collaborators like I discovered ten years ago with Mozilla.”
He also recommends people look at Google’s Chrome OS project, which is being run with a level of transparency and community involvement largely absent from Android, and which is a better representation, he says, of Google’s values.
Unfortunately, even if Google were to develop Android in the open, as the Mozilla foundation does with Firefox, it probably wouldn’t help Android be any more open.
While Google’s approach may be a disingenuous use of the word open — as Hewitt says, Google is doing “bare minimum to meet the definition of open” — there is another problem: the phone carriers.
“The problem is the wireless carriers first and Google second,” says Perens, “because Google enables the carriers to close the Android platform from the user’s perspective.” In other words, while you might be able to copy and paste the code from Rubins’ tweet and take a look at Android yourself, what arrives with actual phone is every bit as tightly controlled as iOS.
Just as there are jailbreaking hacks for the iPhone, there are root hacks for Android that attempt to give the end user some control back. That Android is less controlled by its Google parent in other ways — the Android Market, for instance, is not tightly regulated like Apple’s App Store counterpart — is a secondary benefit. Neither device is open in the sense that the end user can modify it as they see fit — customize it perhaps, but adding a new theme and downloading whatever apps you like are not the goals of open software.
The real goal of open software, as Perens and others have help define it over the years, is to ensure that you can do whatever you want with it. As anyone with an iPhone or and Android phone can tell you, that’s not the current state of affairs on either device. Nearly every smartphone on the market is tightly locked to its carrier’s specifications. There are a few exceptions, like the Nokia N900, which runs Maemo Linux.
The carriers argue that open phones would threaten the network. Steve Jobs argues that an open phone would threaten the user experience.
AT&T used to argue both of the same things during most of the 20th century, when it still maintained total control (what Jobs likes to call an “integrated” system) over land lines — you rented phones from AT&T or you didn’t have one. Decades after several massive anti-trust lawsuits and the breakup of Ma Bell, we’ve ended up back in a similar jam.
Even if there were a truly open source OS for your phone, it’s unlikely it would ever truly be open by the time it arrived in your hand.
Scott Gilbertson
Call me Lead Monkey.
Read more by Scott Gilbertson
Follow @webmonkey on Twitter.
Tags: Android, Andy Rubin, Apple, Bruce Perens, Google, ios, Joe Hewitt, Open Source, Steve Jobs
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Penti
Your forgetting one importing thing patents! Your not actually given the license to use the software, just the license to the copyrighted material, not the right to use the IPR. You also didn't write anything about all the proprietary software that's included. The core is open source, but the platform isn't a open source platform, much in the same way as the kernel for OS X and iOS is OSI approved open source. Not does the phone makers nor can they really let you access the full source, neither is it encourage to roll your own build or even make changes to the software that's included without flashing a new ROM, this goes against the anti-tivoization principal. It still makes it open source and not infringing on anything. Many devices use linux, but many of makes it impossible to do any changes to the linux kernel that's included. The license dictates they must release their kernel changes (and any open source drivers, but not necessarily complete), but they can lock it down from changing it out. Other important stuff is all the IPR, trademarks and patents! Your simply not allowed to fork it and call it Android, stuff like the video codecs included requires licenses for tens of millions of dollars to be distributed in a phone. Which of course the phone companies has, but not any independent vendor that's not in that business and aren't large enough to do it.
Phone manufacturers might let you install apps from outside the market if you enable it on Android, which of course is necessary for development but can also be used to distribute apps directly, you can mail them over or whatever. You can install alternative app markets or you can bypass them all together accordingly. But you can't escape that you need illegal homebrew and a lot of hacking to actually change out the system.
All of this is also why Mozilla don't support H.264 or other proprietary video formats, and why truly free Chromium builds should have H.264 off providing no support for H.264 or any other commercial video format through it's source/software.
It's not open if one law says you can do it and another one says you can't, trade marks are fine, it don't impede anybodies ability to modify their own program internally but might just restrict some measures ones distributed publically. The patent's means you can do neither. If your aren't a licensee. And of course nobody is requesting access to the baseband. That's not running android any way. That's a whole other deal, but also one that might constrain you. But following the Chromium model just wouldn't work with a mobile phone OS, it would mean locking out any feature requiring any sort of IPR license. That's not granted with the software that is. But in the end a part of Android is open source, a port of iOS is open source, neither does give you the right to change and modify the mobile os. Neither is the proprietary software included redistributable at all from a home brew perspective. And of course it's all customized to your phone. Those sources you can't get your hands on. Or only partially. Your not allowed to boot up anything else. You might be able to fix the code but you can't really legally get it in there or distribute it. And if you can't change the software it doesn't really matter how much access to the software you have. I mean you could buy a "developer" phone and roll your own OS. But without licensing for distribution what are you going to do with it. For the end user it's no different then commercially dual licensed open source, except he can hardly use a community edition or build on just any device. Neither is anyone granted the rights to redistribute the whole system. The source code is released for the OEMs or phone makers. Just such a thing like android market is a proprietary closed source program and system you can't access if the phone/OS aren't validated by Google. It's simply made to be locked down. The open source parts are mostly fine, but not everything included under mainly Apache license projects is actually Apache License. It kinda makes the situation dubious for anybody making a Android phone. Licensing of IPR is definitively needed and are not free. It's a collaborative open platform for the phone manufacturers but one that aren't really that collaborative or open for them either. It's though to contribute a piece to the project and if you change around to much on your own private branch (that's going into the phone) you can't call it Android any more. It really belong to the group of the open Symbian project. It's a royalty free project that you need to pay patent royalties for
It's not a free and open platform it's common platform for the vendors. Not the users. But with a lot of open source in it. But as pointed out you have OSI approved software licenses in iOS too, the difference there is just that the application framework is closed where android framework is the open bit. Both is of course developed with a closed model.
But if you really want source you can get source for Windows too. Major corporations and a few partners have access to the source. Android is simply an open source project with open source software licenses (for most bits), but not a open platform with complete modifiable open source licensed operating system.
Being an open source OS and a open source project in an OS is kinda not the same thing
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1 year ago
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Alricky
So what if Google wants to program Android in private. You have to look at it from the standpoint that Google has competitors. It would make better sense to do your cutting-edge programming in secret than to have it open to the world.
Steve Jobs is really a piece of work being such a hypocrite.
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1 year ago
1 Like
