Jean-Baptiste Queru the gatekeeper for the Android Open Source Project(AOSP) announced recently that an experiment to bring AOSP support to the Sony Xperia S had been undertaken and that a specific git project has been created for this purpose. The aim is to see the project gain support from the community to get a build up and running. Currently the project is empty but JBQ has suggested that he would be likely adding a set of makefiles followed by a Kernel. He has been very specific to be careful about any proprietary files for the Xperia S and advised not to upload anything that doesn’t have an appropriate license.
Earlier this year, JBQ praised Sony and their efforts in getting ICS to devices such as the Tablet S relatively quickly and taking particular note of their efforts in contributing source code to AOSP. Sony has also been fairly good to the Android Modding community in giving help to devs working on Cyanogen Mod and working with the FreeXperia team. Android Central has actually approached Sony regarding the project and they’ve been advised :
Sony Mobile encourages and supports external innovation and the openness that Android brings.
Our Developer World team have supported community driven Android projects for a long time
It is now great to see that representatives from started this project, which aims at putting latest Vanilla Android on Xperia S, thanks to our unlockbootloader service. It is great to see that the project already received support from community of Android developers who can contribute to the project Google opened up. This project is driven outside Sony Mobile, however we will of course follow the progress and see if there are things we can contribute with along the way.
So it doesn’t sound like they’ll be openly dropping code into the project but perhaps if a snag is hit along the way they may help out possibly? Any way to get phones onto AOSP is a good thing in my opinion but we’ll see how it goes for now.
