Toward a freer Android

“The dust has mostly settled after Google’s shutdown of the
Cyanogen build for Android phones. Nobody can really dispute
Google’s core claim that Cyanogen was redistributing proprietary
software in ways not allowed by the license. But numerous people
have disputed Google’s good sense; those applications are freely
downloadable elsewhere and can only run on phones which already
shipped with a copy. So shutting down their redistribution does
Google little (if any) good, but it has had a harsh chilling effect
over the enthusiastic communities that were promoting Android and
trying to make it better. Now those communities are trying to
regroup and continue their work, but the rules of the game have
changed.

“The most community-friendly representative within Google has
long been Jean-Baptiste Queru; he clearly puts quite a bit of time
into helping other developers work with Android. He is now at the
center of an effort to turn Google’s “Android Open Source Project”
(AOSP) into something deserving of that name. Jean-Baptiste has
(belatedly, one might say) figured out one of the major obstacles
to contributing to the platform: the difficulty of actually running
one’s changes.

“The primary target form factor for Android is a phone. That
means that, deep inside, a fundamental part of allowing writers to
play their part is to allow the Android Open-Source Project to be
used on phones. And, by that, I don’t just mean that it needs to
compile and boot, i mean that it has to be usable as a day-to-day
phone. Right now, it’s not. The range of applications is too
limited, the applications that are in there don’t all work, and
there are quite a few system glitches along the way.”

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