What could possibly compete with the Apple iPhone? Who is everyone’s nightmare? It’s Google.

Android is the name of the first free open source and fully customizable mobile platform. They offer a full stack and operating system middleware and key mobile applications and also a rich set of APIs so that anyone can develop and create great applications.

The site I like the most is source.android.com. You can get the source code directly from that website. If you’re in application developer you can visit the android SDK site at code.google.com/android.

On the android open source project website you can grab the source, you can report bugs, and of course you can contribute in many ways. There are code reviews, patch history, and known issues section jump on the mailing list and check out the documentation. If you want to learn more about the project itself they have a section for the project layout release features. You can view the current roadmap check out the project roles and licenses.

The roadmap is interesting and is not as detailed as one might think they only have a couple bullets for first quarter 2009 and beyond first quarter 2009 however gives you the general idea of where they’re going. The project roles section gives you a general understanding of how you can participate. Anyone can join the mailing lists, ask questions, report bugs etc.

Then they have other roles such as verifiers, approvers and project leads. Verifiers are responsible for testing change requests. Approvers have to be experienced and they are members of the project who have shown their design skills and made significant contributions to the project. Essentially one of the approvers has to decide whether or not to include or exclude a change. To be an approver you have to be chosen by a project lead. Project leads have a lot of responsibility on all aspects of the project. They could be dealing with the roadmap development QA release cycles and more.

Then there is also the core technical team. To be part of the core technical team you need to have quite a bit of experience and expertise in specific core areas could be anything from QA to application development or application framework even platform security and power management, as you can imagine is necessary on a mobile phone. Currently they are on android 1.0 features and you can look at the applications framework runtime native libraries and what hardware is supported.

If you want to get the source code there’s a page that explains exactly how to do that the source is approximately 2.1 GB in size however to complete the build to legally 6 GB of space you want to build and test the linux machine they suggest is to use ubuntu, or you could also use the Mac OS. They explain how to get the files build the code and more all in all it’s something worth looking at you might want to give it a try best of luck in either helping with the core source code were in building and developing new applications.

Not only should the best open source software be reviewed but also the best open source coders out there.