this may hold some answers ...

GPLv3
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

the rest is down to the courts
long live Android (hello moto) ...

The question is, which parts of Android are under the GPL? Google have an obligation to release any changes to the Linux kernel and other OSS components. The rest of the Android package (what they wrote from scratch, in house) is not released under GPL.

Google release the remaining source code as and when they are ready. With versions up to 2.3, they released them in a timely manner, but due to the bugs and other problems in Honeycomb, they haven't released the source code yet.

This is a big problem for the OSS community, Android is a hybrid, it is partly OSS (and those bits are generally available) and the rest is released as and when Google is happy, that sticks in OSS throats. They also do not allow the community to contribute to the Android codebase.

Haha! Sorry.

Sometimes the Open Source community can be overly righteous. I can see why Google want to control aspects so that they can compete with other companies like Apple who rely on patents. Google cannot give up their advantage. Though not allowing community code to be added seems stupid unless it opens up problems with the GPL or control overall.

There's nothing wrong with Google getting the best code it can for it's OS. But if it's going to take other people's code, it needs to follow the terms the people who wrote it put on it.

The appearing picture is that Google seems to give very little care to intellectual property rights overall. This is not a good thing.

Jon

Is or not the same idea as osx? Some is open source and some isn't.

IIRC some of it is open source (e.g. the mach/Darwin kernel, webkit etc) but none of it is GPL'ed as far as I know. It's the GPL that requires you to make all of the relevant code public if you use GPL'ed code in your product/system/'work'. There's a difference in nuance between 'open source', 'public domain' and 'GPL'.
The case between Oracle and Google is different anyway - Oracle claim the code in question isn't 'open source' in any real sense, it's Sun's (and therefore Oracle's) property and Google just used it without asking. Apple have occasionally 'cloned' third party utilities in their OS (Sherlock/Spotlight is the obvious example) but as far as I know they've never directly appropriated someone else's code. Or at least they've never been caught...


Jon

The underlying kernel and some tools are from the BSD community which are licensed under the BSD licence.
BSD kind of says "do what the hell you like", the GPL kind of says "do what you like but share everything you've done to it".

Webkit is mostly GPL2.1 with a little BSD2 thrown in.

The rest is of OSX is mostly Apple Public Source Licence (APSL2) with BSD thrown in

This suggests webkit itself is LGPL.

The LGPL only applies to some libraries within WebKit

And the CUPS project is GPL.

I can understand Google's caution, in some areas, while they are dealing with code which will run on smartphones - and not just apps, but the core operating system software. That is very difficult to release, as machines with the code need to be certified around the world, that they will not cause damage to the networks. If Android was truly opensource, they might have even more problems getting phones certified.

it was a problem that Nokia/Symbian hat with apps, when they first launched smartphones and featurephones in the late 90s. They had very tight restrictions on what apps could access, because it would cause problems with the certification of the handsets, if the programmers had access to certain parts of the device.

I assume that the rules have been relaxed or changed somewhat since then, but it is a possible reason.

It still doesn't excuse them for not releasing all the code in a timely. manner, once a stable version exists.