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.
Openness (Score:4, Interesting)
Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest.
It's no really a wonder Android scored the lowest. Google isn't truly a open source company, they only give out source when it suits them and even then they regain most control of it with no discussion or decisions with other non-google developers. Most of their products are also either so crippled (Chronium) or limited by other means (Android and HW makers drivers) that they're practically unusable for real use or development.
One of the strongest selling point of open source is that you can make a little change or fix yourself if you feel the need to. Since Chronium isn't truly the source code of Chrome you have to give up lots of other things if you want to make that change. For making a small change it would probably be better to disassembly Chrome and make the change in ASM. Android is basically useless to you if you want to make a change since you cannot run it on your phone. It's nice and all that they provide code (even with stripped parts), but there is no practical use for it. Besides, most of their products are closed source just like their competitors. There's a really insightful and interesting post here [slashdot.org] about Google's practices.
Re:Openness (Score:5, Interesting)
Android is basically useless to you if you want to make a change since you cannot run it on your phone.
Tell that to the masses of people that have ditched the vendor supplied version of android for customized versions.. it is actually pretty darn common amongst young people. Even non-geeks, all it takes is seeing one extra feature they like to convince and having a half hour of spare time.