If I understand correctly, it sounds a bit like Valve and SteamOS. They publish the source, but they optimize for their internal developers and tools, not for easy source access by anonymous members of the public. Valve has been publishing its source as tarballs, not git commits (hence, projects like Jovian and Evlav reconstructing it in GitHub).

"likely just noise"

It's always noise to people that don't care, but matters to people who rely on AOSP, including third-party ROM developers.

You are saying that non-Google parties are reliant on AOSP being developed in the open on a public Gerrit instance? In what way?

Where do you think LineageOS gets their feature updates and security patches?

We can be less blindsided when the latest wave of anti-consumer features are announced.

I think the determinant will be how transparently this process is maintained.

Right - Google has been less than stellar with Chromium with ad revenue motivations behind manifest v3. One can only assume that other changes are being pushed and it'll be too late to fight when the OS ships before or same day as source.

As others say, it breaks contributions and any chance that other forks will keep up.

Which is bad since all the forks will be behind at least few weeks, months maybe.

And think about all the merge conflicts you have to resolve after 3 months of code changes.

This is technically how open source is supposed to work. There never was any obligation to develop in public, or technically to release the source code publicly either. There is no obligation to communication, bug requests, etc.

The obligation is specifically to provide the source code (without certain usage restrictions) for binary releases when requested, and no more.

First they came....(Explains the strategy)

Additionally, that's already the case for much of the Android projects. The remaining projects that developed directly in AOSP will develop on the internal branch like the rest.

I don't understand the difference between what is described in the article and how Android has been developed from the start. They have always developed new versions internally and then dumped into AOSP right before release. https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/T4XZJCZnqF8/m...

Some projects developed directly in AOSP. Those projects will now develop on the internal branch like the rest. So it's not as big of a change as some are making it out to be.

Developing in the open would make contributions from the community way more viable, would give the public the ability to see what's coming and prepare for it, would increase the likelihood that security vulnerabilities or other bad things are discovered and prevented early on. It would make the project more likely to serve the interests of its users.

>The source will still be released

Lol nice pipe dream. The source isn't even fully released today.

The source for AOSP. Individual Android devices have never been open source (minus some very few exceptions), and they have no obligation to do so as AOSP is Apache/permissively licensed.

Note that the demand for secrecy is primarily driven by device manufacturers, not Google. Manufacturers want to keep their "secret sauce" from their competitors.

Google has gradually been moving things from AOSP (open) to GApps (closed). Some of the things that have been moved are fairly essential for a mobile operating system (like a location provider and a SMS app). Projects building on AOSP now have to provide replacements, or declare them out of scope and punt.

They don't publish the really interesting sources anyway, this doesn't really change anything.

Right, they’re making the Gerrit instance private.