Android Gathers Steam Among Open Source Developers 176
svonkie writes "Despite launching on the T-Mobile G1 with little mainstream fanfare, Google Inc.'s Android OS appears to have gained strong interest in the open source development community. According to a survey of Black Duck Software's Knowledge Base, Apple Inc.'s iPhone led the industry with 266 open source project releases during 2008, while Android followed in second place with 191 releases. Black Duck compiled the data after scouring through over 185,000 of open source projects across 4,000 Internet sites."
Gathers stream? What fucking era are you from? (Score:1, Insightful)
Turn in your geek credentials, you phoney!
OpenMoko (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about Nokia and PyS60 ? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's a case of too little too late. They didn't open it up until they saw the headlight of the train that was the iPhone and Google coming out of the tunnel.
If you're an upstart with funding for 1, maybe 2 platforms which do you choose? You choose the hot ones.
Re:FOSS / GPL / GNU/Linux - What Did You Expect (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think there is anything wrong with those ideas above. The problem seems to me is a lack of focus. The only thing that stopped me from buying one is from reading the forums and seeing how unstable it was. I don't care about 99% of features, the only important thing is that it can make calls. Unfortunately this appears to be its main failing, with the handset falling over regularly and failing to lock onto carrier cells. I quote the following from the CEO:
"We tried to refocus the company around these ideas. This led to an application called Diversity. The basic idea is the following:
Neos talk to other Neos using a self-creating, self-healing, global free (WiFi) network. The software system, code named Diversity, consists of many clients (Neos) talking to servers and, at a later time, self-connecting, using mesh-like interactions."
http://lists.openmoko.org/nabble.html#nabble-td2103754|a2103754
It seems to me their priorities aren't really in order.
Philip.
Re:Google needs more US Providers (Score:3, Insightful)
True. I'm stuck on EDGE as well (but I'm only a few miles from 3G land so I'm hoping that will change soon enough).
In any case, they certainly aren't exclusive to T-mobile by design. T-mobile is just the only company who has picked them up so far. Sprint is apparently working on an android-based phone (granted Sprint isn't really any better than T-mobile). I think the other companies just don't quite know how to handle a phone that isn't 100% locked into selling add-on services.
The open platform will have an impact soon enough. I can't see how companies will avoid it - a real opportunity for application standardization across providers and hardware. No royalties and politics to use the OS.
Re:Dumbass (Score:4, Insightful)
In short: if the code is BSD-licensed, the and you GPL it, you're saying "I will share these changes with my own community, not with the community who I got the code from in the first place". Which is just a bit of an asshole thing to do.
The most important difference between the BSD license and the GPL is that the BSD license doesn't require you to share your changes with anybody. If you've got a problem with someone not giving back to the community, then you shouldn't be using the BSD license in the first place.