On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 01:14:22PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
I didn't know this about Cyanogenmod. I use stock firmware on all my Android devices, acting like a dumb consumer (sadly, that's what I am). I just assumed Cyanogenmod was open if I wanted to bother. Is it like dd-wrt?
That is my understanding. They used to be open, then the leaders did a dd-wrt and went some other direction and a new project got forked. Certainly supporting a qualcomm device with open code is quite hard. Google has even had trouble getting factory images for nexus phones released because of qualcomm, and qualcomm is the reason the android open source project leader at google resigned.
I guess most things about Android are pretend-open (fauxpen?). As time goes by more of the important features are closed source. And "open" was almost always a one way street from Google.
Oh very much so. Android is not open source in the way most people think of open source. It is developed by google behind closed doors, provided to key partners, then launched on new devices, then the code is released for others to play with. No one outside google (and perhaps they key partners) have any say in what goes into android. -- Len Sorensen