
A friend asked (quite reasonably) "Just curious if you have downloaded [the] Android SDK ... I don't want to commit my company to whatever the license says so I'll hold off on doing my own analysis."
I did a little snooping and what I found:
- Looking at the download site and the license terms made clear: the download greement is with Google, Inc., a Delaware corporation, not the so-called "Open Handset Alliance". (Thus putting the lie to the idea of the OHA being "co-sponsored" by four other companies.)
- There's no source code on the site, under an Open Source Initiative-approved license or any other license.
- According to the architecture diagram, as much Android code as possible is based on a BSD (or comparable) permissive license. No viral GPLv3 here, so presumably DRM and music players will be available on gPhones.
- Android is a platform for Java applets, not native C/C++ apps. Symbian, of course, has native apps, and it sounds like even Apple will have a native app SDK before the gPhone ships.
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