Android Goes Open Source One Day Before Launch
Amit Chowdhry | Tuesday October 21, 2008 | 781 views| 1 Comment
As Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) promised, they have open-sourced the code for their Android operating system. Google makes this move just-in-time for tomorrow’s opening sales day of the Android-powered T-Mobile HTC G1 phones. Google is officially dubbing the project as the “Android Open Source Project.”
Below is a brief description of the project, provided by Google software engineer Dave Bort :
Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.
Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.
The source code is 2.1GB in download size and requires 6GB for the complete build.
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