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By Stephen Shankland, 22 October 2008 08:54

NEWS

Less than a year after announcing Android, the open-source phone operating system intended to jump-start the mobile internet, Google began sharing the project's underlying source code.

The Android Open Source Project site includes a project list, a feature description, guides to the roles people can have in the project and how to contribute, and of course the Android source code itself.

Google has one team of programmers building the software and another professional services group to help support phone makers building Android phones. Now, though, as T-Mobile's G1 arrives on the market, Google hopes to multiply that by drawing upon the collective energy of outside contributors to the project.

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Rich Miner, manager of Google's mobile platforms group, said: "Our plan is a launching point for a much more vibrant open-source community. For the past almost four years, this has been a large effort between Google and our partners. There have been a lot of people working on the code but that's going to be multiplied by several orders of magnitude."

Open-source software can be freely used, modified, and redistributed by anyone, freedoms that make it a daunting competitor to proprietary software companies that charge for the code. Although open-source software rarely has been the sole basis for a thriving company, it can be a powerful tool to aid a broader agenda. Technology companies such as IBM, Oracle, and even Apple often subsidise open-source projects for that reason, and Android fits into that category.

So what does this mean for Android? Four members of the Open Handset Alliance, which co-developed the Android software, build mobile phones: HTC, which build the T-Mobile G1, as well as Motorola, LG Electronics and Samsung. And another alliance member, Wind River Systems, believes Android will power consumer electronics devices including set-top boxes and in-car computing systems.

Now that Android is open-source software, though, other manufacturers may use it, and Miner said they will. Indeed, Wind River said Kyocera is building an Android phone.

"Think what happened to PC clones in the 1980s and 1990s timeframe. We're starting to see coming out of Taiwan the equivalent of a Micron motherboard", inexpensive mobile phone hardware that now can be made useful with Android, Miner said.

This time, though, Microsoft Windows isn't going to be the operating system that spreads like wildfire, if Google has anything to do with it. "There are a billion mobile phones sold every year that don't have a good, highly connected mobile operating system," Miner said. Android is intended as an answer to that issue, and one that sidesteps the controls over software by rival operating systems such as Windows Mobile and Nokia's Symbian, he said.

"We feel fairly strongly, and it's resonating loudly through the industry, that innovation is maximised when no one entity controls a platform," Miner said.

Some open-source fans have criticised Google for being too closed with Android in its early stages. But Miner insists that Android, while initially developed in-house, is indeed a true open-source project.

"It was built with intention of open-sourcing it," Miner said, pointing specifically to project details such as its architecture, comments in the code, and the code's structure. "We decided we didn't need to build release 1.0 as open source...We engineered 1.0 as a best-in-class, fully staffed, engineered product. Having delivered that, we think it's time to start leveraging the benefits of what open source can bring."