Measuring Openness In Open Source Projects 65
suy writes "Several open source projects exist under a variety of licenses, and we qualify them as free/open source depending on the license under which the final product is released. But there are other considerations, like the existence of a public roadmap, participation in the decision making, or access to the latest source code to make contributions. Vision Mobile has published a report that compares and measures the openness of several open source projects: Android, Eclipse, Linux, MeeGo, Mozilla, Qt, Symbian (till the existence of the Foundation) and WebKit. Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest."
A related article about the report asks whether open source needs corporate backing to truly succeed.
Re:Openness (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, and yet somehow people still scream about how open Android is and how locked down iOS is.
The language mutation continues. (Score:0, Insightful)
I find this mutation, the attempt to make it inclusive odd, but perhaps inevitable. I guess once people give up the notion of property, they feel perfectly entitled to make free with other people's development time, as well as their work product.
"Hey, guess what? The lunatics have taken a vote, they think they should be running the asylum. They won."
Re:Open Source has nothing to do with openness (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh, no... "Open Source" is not a license – it's an idea. There are many licenses that are written with the idea in mind. The idea is *everything* to do with openness.
Re:Openness (Score:2, Insightful)
What good is that if you can't contribute back, you can't change the direction of the project, you can't put it on your device, and you can't well... us it.
Re:Openness (Score:5, Insightful)
Honeycomb, of course, isn't OSS ATM, but again, they have good reasons for that.
There really isn't a good reason. If your code is good enough to sell on a device, it's good enough to be opened.
A lot of Android fanboys do logical loops explaining that Android is truly open, and some parts of it are, but a lot of it isn't. Accept it.
Re:Openness (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not for submitting a patch to android, that's for submitting to ASOP, not the same thing.
Re:Openness (Score:3, Insightful)
That gets you the open source parts of the device... who ever said the drivers were open source? Note, in 99.9% of cases, the drivers *aren't* open source.