It was a dark day across Android fandom when the news that the next iteration of Android, Honeycomb, would not be open source. As the announcement of the next version, Ice Cream Sandwich, was released, one of the big questions waiting to be answered was whether or not Android 4.0 is going to be released by Google. Knowing that we are a few days away from the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the UK, the hope was that the Android 4.0 source would be released some time after the device launch. Any questions as to Google’s intent to release the source have been squashed after a message from Jean-Baptiste Queru, a Googler on the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP). Source code for Android 4.0 has been released!AOSP has been Google’s project from the beginning of Android to allow for anybody to download and compile “stock Android”. From here, you can add device specific bits like drivers and build Android 4.0 for a device of your choosing. OEM’s can now make Android 4.0 based devices, and ROM developers like the CyanogenMod team can add features of their own design to devices they support. Anybody can compile Android with the right software on your computer. Google provides anybody with step by step instructions for compiling Android simply by heading to source.android.com.Included in the message provided by the AOSP team is the understanding that source for Android 3.0 has been released as well. While the note clearly says, “However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich”, the possibility now exists for ROM developers to compile both modified Honeycomb builds and Ice Cream Sandwich builds for tablets that Android OEM’s might consider “legacy”. The notion that Honeycomb was a little incomplete could hail back to the original issue with Honeycomb, being that Google didn’t want OEM’s trying to push it to phones where it didn’t belong. There’s also the possibility that Honeycomb wasn’t quite as ready as Google had hoped when it launched, and source wasn’t available to hide the messy code that was used so Google could get their foot in the door of the great tablet race.As you read this, ROM developers of every kind are scrambling to compile Android 4.0 AOSP so they can play with it. Some will slightly modify it, some will push current drivers to it in an attempt to make it compatible for other devices. Some developers, like the CyanogenMod team, will be working to implement the long list of features they have developed over time and attempt to make their version of 4.0 compatible with as many devices as possible. Due to its nature as the current “Google Experience” device, it is more than likely the first thing we will see stock Android 4.0 on will be the Nexus S.  As the developers across Android fandom stockpile caffeine and prepare for the next batch of excitement from Google, the rest of us get to sit back and watch, wondering if the ROM developers will have an Android 4.0 device in the wild before Google does. Hey, they’ve got about 36 hours, right? read more