zlacker

So this is effectively the "Oracle Solaris" moment of Android, but without changing ownership?

Nice. While Android was not open source for a long time, at least it's not openwashed anymore.

>>bayind+(OP)
> While Android was not open source for a long time

What do you mean by this? Maybe you couldn't get your contributions in, but you could fork Android any time.

>>dotanc+a3
Any important and useful part of Android is already moved to closed source components long time ago.

Moreover, without closed source and kernel targeted drivers, it’s not possible to even boot hardware with Android for an eternity now. None of the companies will give you even an object file which you can link against a more modern kernel (given the delta is not that big so ABI is not broken), yet alone the source code.

As a result, Android is a big mountain of open code, without the crucial parts needed to make it work. AOSP is a shell of its former shell, and being emptied day by day.

Now it’s moving to a cathedral model from a bazaar one, and who knows when Google will release the source code of the “new version” of AOSP. They may even strip the tree to GPL parts since they have to open these parts and conveniently forget to update the MIT parts on the open part.

IOW, silently stop as Oracle did for the parts they can.

>>dotanc+a3
It was closed-source for the entirety of Android 3.x “Honeycomb”, the tablet-only Android version that introduced Holo on the Motorola XOOM etc. Source code for 3.x was retroactively made available when 4.0 resumed its open-sourceness:

https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/T4XZJCZnqF8

>>3235926

> This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases. However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich. So, we haven't created any tags that correspond to the Honeycomb releases (even though the changes are present in the history.)