[justina1]

It seems to me they had two choices with the Honeycomb code: release something sub par or wait. And it seems like they landed on the side of quality over speed.

Does that decision benefit their partners and hurt others? Yes. And if you want to argue holding the code back was a business move and not a quality issue, that's fair, but it's the one card they can play to ensure high-quality devices in the market.

As an Android user, I say let them keep it.

[cube13]

But Google has released the code to partners. Motorola has shipped the Xoom. Acer is releasing a tablet in a couple of weeks. HTC and Samsung are also releasing devices in the next few months.

If the code is good enough to go in production devices, why isn't it good enough to be released to the public?

[orangecat]

If the code is good enough to go in production devices, why isn't it good enough to be released to the public?

It's quite easy to create a code base that mostly works well, but whose structure and organization is utterly unsuitable for a public release. This is especially true when you have a marketing-driven deadline (e.g. "ship before the iPad 2") and have to take shortcuts.

[nathanb]

For an open source project the code is the product. If you claim to be open yet release your bits before the code, you are deluding yourself.

The quote from Savoia and Copeland in the article seems to be saying that Google won't release the code until the product sees market in order to maintain their competitive advantage. That's one thing. But when they continue to sit on the code when the product is out, that's another thing entirely.

[PetrolMan]

It hasn't been widely released yet. As far as I know the Xoom is it. Others are in development or being prepared for release.

[cube13]

Asus has shipped a tablet with Honeycomb on it. Also, they have also released the GPL-covered Linux kernel code as well.

[ZeroGravitas]

They claim it is ready for tablets, and have offered it to any tablet maker as long as they contact them and presumably sign some kind of NDA to prevent source release. I've not heard of any tablet maker, no matter how small, being refused.

They have said it's not suitable for phones, apparently Honeycomb and Gingerbread were divergent forks that need to be merged rather than simply building on top of each other linearly.

[barista]

I'd rather call it unfinished than subpar. But taht cannot be the just fication to not release it especially if you are in the open source domain? That is where you solicit early feedback, allow people to see and play with the code which it is still baking.

To me it looks like they chose to be a little protective of their ideas, features etc in honeycomb. Nothing necessarily bad with it. AAPL and MSFT do it all the time but what is sad is that they do it while posing as a good citizen in open source world.