Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Google's open-source Android now actually open

Less than a year after announcing Android, the open-source phone operating system intended to jump-start the mobile Internet, Google began sharing the project's underlying source code.

The Android Open Source Project site includes a project list, a feature description, guides to the roles people can have in the project and how to contribute, and of course the Android source code itself.

Google has one team of programmers building the software and another professional services group to help support phone makers building Android phones. Now, though, as T-Mobile's G1 arrives on the market, Google hopes to multiply that by drawing upon the collective energy of outside contributors to the project.

"Our plan is a launching point for a much more vibrant open-source community," said Rich Miner, manager of Google's mobile platforms group. "For the past almost four years, this has been a large effort between Google and our partners. There have been a lot of people working on the code, but that's going to be multiplied by several orders of magnitude." Read More..

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