Group Of Enthusiastic Hackers On The Roll - The Replicant Project

Heard of the Replicant project?
Replicant is a completely free distribution of Android already up and running on several devices.

The Replicant project was founded by Bradley M. Kuhn, Aaron Williamson, Graziano Sorbaioli, Denis Carikl. They are no private organization or company but instead a group of highly skilled developers/hackers who have given Android a new face. They intend to make the platform completely open source through their distribution.

They have their own SDK with which you can write apps for different versions of Replicant, the SDK is similar to Android SDK except that it is totally free and even comes with an emulator for those without a phone to test on. They have created an app similar to Play Store which comes default on all Android phones called FDroid which will only contain apps listed under free software license.

They have released several images of Replicant for various devices and continues to develop for more. Visit their Wiki for a detailed list of supported devices.
List of the bare minimum requirements for a device to be ported to Replicant:

• The device must be supported by CyanogenMod officially (better) or via 3rd party repos
• There must be a way to flash images (via bootloader or recovery) using a free program
• The kernel must not be signed: the bootloader must not check the kernel signature
• The kernel sources must have been released
• The network type must be GSM, no CDMA phone can be supported for now

Anyone interested in porting Replicant to their devices are welcome to do so and can use their help. For more info on targets for Replicant refer this link. The project is not backed by any corporate and is a  purely  community based one and hence requires maximum support.

Is Android Not Open Source?

Well most of us are familiar with Android as being an open source mobile platform, but i think its time to measure the extend of its openness.

 According to an article in PCWorld by Katherine Noyes a study conducted by research firm Vision Mobile using an Open Governance Index created by them revealed that Android is the most closed (only 23% open) of the eight different open source projects which include : Android, MeeGo, Linux, Qt, WebKit, Mozilla, Eclipse, and Symbian

Now we know what open source is, a popular example of an open source OS can be considered as Linux and Android is built on the same Linux kernel. Upon having a closer look at how Android ticks we find that AOSPs (Android Open Source Projects) can be made for a variety of devices from readily available source codes, but it impossible to get complete functionality from a device without its own OEM specific codes. Which means unlike Ubuntu on your PC, your Android phone even though being open source requires some manufacturer specific codes to run at its full potential. It has also been observed that certain core android apps are closed source in nature. While all these so said limitations can be overcome with time and effort an average user wouldn't feel the difference, but still according to Conan Troutman at xda-developers the guys at Free Software Foundation (FOSS) are set to create an Android distribution that is free of proprietary code in all form and they have named the project as Replicant.

Stay tuned ...

 Cause we're coming real soon with loads of stuffs to let you know The How Of Things ...

Meanwhile an interesting thought from CISCO