Android is out!
As most people probably know by now, the Android source code is available, as promised:
The next part is the interesting part, though, in my opinion. Source code is wonderful, and a huge gift from Google, but the real "secret sauce" for the most successful open source projects is the community. It will be interesting to see how Google manages this aspect of their project. It could be a situation where they create, and the public consumes, and it's fairly one way, with the odd patch here and there going back. Or it could be that they'll really let people get involved. Running a community for something this big, with this much code, and this much interest to the world at large is a daunting task, but Google certainly has the open source expertise to figure it out, so what we end up seeing will depend on exactly how Google wants to manage things.
All in all though, a big step for open source - congratulations to all the people at Google who made it happen!
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about {{count}} hours later:
Great, now people we'll look into all the technical feats. I wonder how they managed to have many instances of the Dalvik VM running indipently but still sharing some resources (the underlying Linux wouldn't allow you to do that I'd say).
about {{count}} hours later:
About the efficiency of multiple Dalvik VMs, I'll just add a link to a presentation I hadn't listened to carefully enough at the time.
http://sites.google.com/site/io/dalvik-vm-internals
Basically, a Dalvik VM process is created at the beginning. Each new instance of the VM is a 'fork' of the original one (that is called, ironically, Zygote).
What I did not know is that the 'fork' action in Unix is highly efficient and makes a copy of the memory pages just when they get modified, which you wouldn't expect for most code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(operating_system)
P.S. I always seem to get an error the first time I try to post a comment on this blog.
{{count}} days later:
It's definitely an interesting architecture - maybe it will be useful to people implementing other sorts of embedded systems.
Thanks too for letting me know about the broken comments - I'm working on fixing it.