Android will be open source…eventually
It’s been a few months since the initial buzz of the Android SDK release, and the technology itself continues to look great. Ed Burnette recently posted a blog indicating Android will be 100% open source.
In it he notes that Google says they fully intend to open up all of
their code using appropriate open source licenses (including EPL!), but
they’re not yet ready because some of the API’s aren’t done. They’re
afraid of having to support bad API’s forever. Yes, that sounds
familiar, and of course the Eclipse response is: maybe if they opened
up their API’s, others could then help them evolve those API’s to a
point where the overall community was happy. We have provisional API’s
in Eclipse for exactly this reason. At a minimum, I wish Google would publish a timetable (gasp!) for getting this code opened up. Ed says Google will open (most) everything by the end of 2008. Please see the comments for details.
I want to revisit the two requests I made in my original post.