www.enterpriseitplanet.com/networking/news/article.php/3779566
By Pedro Hernandez October 21, 2008
Yesterday it was discovered that Motorola is planning to build an Android smartphone. When released in the second quarter of 2009, the company plans to set its Android-powered handset apart with built-in social networking capabilities. Today, the field got a little more crowded as Kyocera Wireless revealed that it too plans to take a stab at Android hardware. Although few details have been made public, it is known that Kyocera has tapped Wind River to provide integration services for the effort. A member of the Open Handset Alliance, Wind River will help Kyocera make the hardware and software play well together as well customize the OS for Kyocera's implementation. Separately, Wind River is commercializing its integration services and software platform to help other manufacturers and service providers get a leg up on their future Android-based offerings. But the big news of the day -- for developers, at least -- is that the Open Handset Alliance, and by extension Google, has released the Android platform as open source. In an inaugural post at the Android Open Source Project Web site, Google software engineer Dave Bort wrote, "Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community. All of the work that we've poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project." He hints that smartphones are just the start for Android. 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 project lists Apache 2.0 is the preferred license but does make room for complications that may arise, as they so often do. While the project will strive to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions which will be handled on a case-by-case basis. For example, the Linux kernel patches are under the GPLv2 license with system exceptions, which can be found on kernel.org. Meanwhile, interested parties can download the Android source here. |
|
|
The Android ecosystem is experiencing a growth spurt just as T-Mobile's Android-powered handset, the G1 by HTC, is about to land on store shelves.