How does it affect me as a developer/engineer/company that Android is open source
- by danke
I understand the concept of open source, but I just realized now that I understand it from only one view: when I open source my own code. I don't really understand what benefit I'm getting from receiving the same thing.
As a regular developer (like the majority of us here), I did not spend the past 4 years of my life working on "developing" the android. So even though I'm a developer, I'm at the end of the developers chain when it comes to the Android (like most of us). I'm really more of an end user. So my interest in Android isn't really to dedicate all my time to it or work on improving its kernel or anything overly ambitious.
So with that clear, as a developer considering developing for the Android, how does it really benefit me that it's open source? What's the added benefit that I'm missing? Can other developers share some concrete ways that its open source status actually affects us as developers.
Basically I'm trying to understand how we, at this developer level, can make sense of the fact that it's open source, or is its open source status just hype for us at our end developer level.
Thanks