Preface

There was a lot of buzz in late 2007 about a forthcoming Google-backed open source mobile phone venture, but there weren’t a lot of details. We were interested from the outset because we were all involved with open source projects in one way or another, and we were Linux users with a Java background. The new Google-backed “Java/Linux phone platform,” as several blogs and pundits termed it at the time, was exciting and it seemed to suit us perfectly.

Then several official press releases from the Open Handset Alliance came out and the word Java was absent from all of them. At the same time it supposedly ran a “custom virtual machine” and several people who we knew to be Java guys were tapped to work on various parts of it. Was this thing Java or not? This was the first of the ways Android intrigued us, before we were even sure what it was.

When more details about the platform emerged, it became clear that it would use Java “the language” but would avoid the Sun (at the time) virtual machine, and it would deviate from the standard Linux kernel/distribution approach. Google and their OHA partners were using a lot of existing and open tools and components, but were wiring them up in a new way and mixing in parts of their own.