LWN.net Logo

Android and Open Source (ABN)

Android and Open Source (ABN)
[Press] Posted Apr 2, 2009 18:52 UTC (Thu) by corbet

Here is a serious criticism of the Android project posted to the Android Blogging Network. "In a successful hybrid open/closed project, the open source releases drive the closed source forks. Witness Apache httpd (open) and IBM httpd (closed). They have the same codebase, and - shockingly - its not the one in IBMÂ’s secret dungeons that generates new releases. IBM does do their own set of releases, but they work just like everyone else - by taking changes from the open tree and integrating their closed code. Google works with Android in exactly the opposite way - development is done mainly in secret, and occasionally someone takes the time to audit it and dump a huge, unmanageable set of changes into the open source tree."

Comments (16 posted)

Copyright © 2009, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds