[ Thanks to Steven J.
Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]
“This has ticked off pretty much every open-source professional
out there. Android is under the open-source Apache Software License
2.0, which requires that the source code be released when the
executable programs are released. That usually means they’re
released together. But the license doesn’t insist on that.“Historically, Google has played games with the ASL’s terms by
letting big hardware manufacturers, such as HTC, Motorola and Sony,
have an early look at Android source code. Smaller vendors,
developers and open-source purists have been unhappy with that
“some animals are more equal than others” approach in the past, and
now Google is stretching the gap between private release and an
open-source release even further. Some would say it has stretched
the gap to the breaking point.”