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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 03:03 PM EDT |
While it's not a strict requirement to have the Play Store on your device, it's
part of the standard "Google Experience" that most users expect to be
there, and Google keeps the Google Experience apps pretty well-regulated. (see
Steve "Cyanogen" Kondik's run-in with Google over redistributing gapps
around the CM4-CM5 era)
That said, AOSP derivatives are just fine as long as you have some way of
loading the apps you want. Carriers/vendors don't have to make their own basic
apps like launcher, email or browser but, since a basis for easier market
segmentation was one of the major benefits carriers wanted from Android, most
do. (Frankly I wish they wouldn't.)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 07:05 PM EDT |
Yes the source code for the operating system is for the most
part freely available, however Google could just up and
change this. Unlike the GPL, the Apache licence does not
require that the sourcecode be made available.
Google has been faithful in always making their linux kernel
changes publicly available but everything else is entirely
at their whim. They have withheld the Android sourcecode in
the past for partnership reasons and they could conceivably
do this again in the future.
Google does keep a fairly tight grip on many of the Google
apps, APIs, and the Android Marketplace. All of these are
parts of the "Android ecosystem" and exist as userland
software that gets bolted on top of the foundation. Google's
APIs aren't free -- financially or otherwise -- for
commercial purposes. In order to get access to these, as
well as use the Android trademark, the manufacturers have to
meet Google's licensing requirements even if those licensing
requirements do not involve the payment of royalties or
licensing fees.
So while there's certainly enough in the barebones Android
OS to get a phone up and running with little else, the
manufacturers will almost always be forced to add on to it.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 08:48 PM EDT |
http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html
read that.
It's FREE.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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