At least some parts of Android 2.0, Eclair, have been released on the Android Open Source Project. It’s not complete yet, has some missing functions, won’t build for certain hardware and all the other little nuances, but at least it’s being released. It’s better to get some of it out now and let the rest trickle in as it’s finished than completely wait until it’s perfect. But, I imagine parts of this will start getting cooked into custom ROM builds soon. This is is part to Jean-Baptiste Queru, one of Google’s Android Engineers. Here is his posting over at the open source project in full:
I’ve just created an eclair branch in AOSP, which contains the code
that many people have been waiting for.What’s in that branch? It’s basically a snapshot of part of Google’s
internal eclair tree, a little bit more recent than the build that was
used in Droid. It’s not the exact source for Droid and is not ready to
ship on a consumer device.Caveats:
-There’s no change history. Google is planning to eventually make the
change history available, but at the moment the history contains some
things that can’t be open-sourced, and making a snapshot was the
fastest way to deal with those.-It’s a partial tree. We’ll be open-sourcing more of eclair over time,
but we figured it would make more sense to open-source part of it now
instead of waiting until everything was in place.-It doesn’t build for ADP1 or ION/ADP2. We’re working with the various
companies involved to try to resolve this issue, but we preferred to
open-source the code in its current state instead of waiting for a
solution on the hardware side.-It’s not currently merged in the master tree. I’m working on it, but
I wanted to get something out before the week-end. Please be patient.
I’ll try to complete it as quickly as I can.-It doesn’t currently contain the AOSP-specific files (build
configurations, etc…). They’ll come back.-Calendar is broken. I have a fix that I will release along with the
master tree.JBQ
So, this won’t be shipping to existing phones any time soon, but it’s still cool to know it’s being actively worked. Yeah for progress.
