"[T]he release of some Android versions as free
software may have been a temporary ploy to get community
assistance in improving a proprietary software product."
Caveat hacker! "Lax" or "liberal" licenses are traps for the
unwary. Go GPL.
True story: I was part of a globally-distributed group of coders
who were tricked by Dave Winer (co-creator of RSS) in this way
with (what turned out to be) "his" UserLand Frontier product.
All our code was taken and closed-sourced, without attribution
or payment, but more to the point (at least for me), we as users
no longer had access to, let alone influence over, the code. I'm
kind of glad to see Frontier is now dead, and kind of sad; Winer
deserved that, but Frontier didn't. It was a great product, well
designed and well implemented. (Dynamic high-level OOP scripting
environment with built-in transparent object database, all built
around the outlining metaphor). It was always 95%+ by Winer, to
be clear, and his code was ruthlessly good, but Frontier was
still missing essential stuff. For instance, before I started
contributing, the generated HTML pages simply had no HEAD tag
section at all, never mind the really smart (IISSM) META, LINK,
STYLE and SCRIPT tagging I added. Pulling it made no technical
or commercial sense that I could see; the quality, quantity and
speed of growth of community contributions were all increasing.
I think he pulled it for reasons of injured pride rather than
greed. Apple turned it down as a with-the-OS bundle as a second
scripting alternative to the then shambolic and unmaintained
AppleScript.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman
--
Phil Hudson
http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63
