According to Google employees at the I/O conference in San Francisco, Android, Google’s smartphone OS to take on the iPhone, will be completely open source, despite reports to the contrary.
This is great news for those wanting a global OS for smartphones, as this will give programmers the freedom they want to make apps that can do everything. Even codecs will be open, something most vendors wouldn’t allow.
The software will be managed by the ALS, an open source software license that manages many other popular server and OS packages.
There are a couple of exceptions, but they’re minor and won’t affect most devs.