There's good points on both sides of the fence, It is part of the GPL law that the source has to be publically available and it's a little different from the situation with MIUI as the code they aren't releasing is probably completely original (although we can't know that for sure if it's closed, unless it's being held in escrow, which it probably should be if it's not public). The reason they release the source code that you mentioned is because it is based on GPL code, if it's based on GPL code it has to be open source as well, that's why all the manufacturers have to have their little developer code pages that they normally seem to have the bare minimum legal requirements met on (I was compiling motorola code that wouldn't compile because it was written to old standards and I had to go through and manually bring it up to the new specs to compile. After doing that I noticed a little note at the bottom of the code release page that was like "ya, we were being lazy and threw code we wrote a few months ago up to comply with the law and you might want to edit how these specific things are referenced, I forget what exactly it was. I was just mad cause I thought it was an honest mistake and was going to send them my corrections, then I realized they were just totally lazy and didn't bother sending them my stuff, they get paid they can do that work themselves.)
But bottom line the manufacturers really think it's a drag releasing the source, and I'm sure many of them would rather not because they aren't superior enough companies to be able to make competitive products without coded smoke and mirrors.
But the earlier is more of where it seemed that joban was coming from, it's a LOAD of work doing dev, especially when you are your dev team, I was working solo on the Motorola stuff (still am got a little burned out myself and hope to go back and finish my projects there soon) and it can quickly consume large chunks of your days and weeks. I started drawing a little criticism for not having my stuff up on git all quick too and it just increases the workload too much, especially for a lone wolf project. A lot of folks really really appreciate the work devs do and always ask if there is anything to help, and we should take a lot more advantage of that. Stuff like running a git repo isn't very difficult, and there's a lot of tedious stuff in developing that all these volunteers could easily do with very little coaching if we'd take our heads out of our asses and enlist them for anything other then testing/feedback. Really it would make things like complying with GPL disclosure law and playing wheres waldo with sloppy manufacturer code occupy a lot less of our time so we could actually have lives where we arefamous other places then teh internets, like real places. Shoot maybe even have enough time to meet chicks and get laid and such, yeah that's stretching it a bit.
Anyways I imagine joban is too insulted to come back, I can't say I blame him he did some kick ass work and that's a lot of pressure being the only dev developing custom kernels for a phone, Someone should have stepped in and volunteered to help out with the git repo, poor guy probably didn't have even close to enough time to handle that even if he wanted to, ya'll gotta realize custom kernels are friggin time consuming especially by yourself, I didn't have time to do all the git stuff either, probably the only reason I managed to comply and release my code at all was because I have access to my own webhosting, I barely had time to throw all the directorys into tarballs and ftp them to the hosting post the url and by then something's done compiling and requires attention.
That's my two cents, it's a pretty crappy scenerio, especially since he obviously has a passion for tweaking kernels and cooking roms since he said he's gonna do it on his own.
If you're too insulted to come back here, you could always come see us at XDA buddy, it wont be any fun if you don't share your masterpieces with the rest of the community, just try and snatch up some of those eager beavers that keep asking if they can do anything to help and tell them they need to learn how to maintain a repo on github for you so you don't get chewed out next time. It's a damn shame waste of talent if you don't keep up with all this.
As for me, I usually lurk these forums if I'm helping friends and collegues with phones that have stronger communities here then at xda and sdx, but right now I'm preparing three of these p505s that my buddy traded for new in the box for resale, I might just request to hold onto one of them for a little while and see if I can't take a gander at the LG code and maybe put out a custom kernel. I'm on sprint tho so it would all be pretty untested experimental stuff, but I've peeked at the LG source code page a couple times and it looked a lot more inviting the motorola and samsung pages (motorolas looks really inviting until you realize that all of those bells and whistles are for app developers, and the relevent releases there for modifiying the android code itself are pretty weak. Great resources if you want to develop apps that work well with their modifications to android tho.....)
oh well another tl;dr from tcles. I think this might be my first post on this forum but I've been lurking in the shadows to various degrees for awhile, so hi all.
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