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What do they mean "help"? Does this mean that they're going to have to suffer with the consequences of paying devs?
Misleading headline. Instead of public repos, they'll use source snapshots of each release. It's technically correct because the development is going private, but the releases will remain open source.
If I understand you correctly, the developmental changes occurring between releases (every little step change/test) won't be visible to us, just the final results in the form of the release code? (All corrections/clarifications accepted, hell, requested). We'd still be able to compile, but we wouldn't necessarily have code for those small, incremental changes.
It's always been like this for most repositories that make up Android. The few projects that were truly developed in the open, such as ART, will now follow the same private branches as the rest of Android.
Correct. We will, of course, be able to create diffs between the released versions, for the whole project or for individual files (assuming they haven't moved around).
Isn't that sources available, not open source since they aren't allowing community contributions, or am I misunderstanding that?
Kind of like how greyjay is source available but not open source?
Android is licensed under the Apache license 2.0, which is an open source license. Their Linux kernel modifications are licensed under the GPL v2. https://source.android.com/license
Accepting contributions is not required to be open source.
This really sucks. Why isn't it making more noise ?
Because effectively nothing is changing. Android is still open source, OEMs still have access to the internal branches for early development, custom ROMs will still have to wait until the new version is released to source entirely.
There are many other apps, like Signal, that have the same development approach but no one complained about it. It's just a lot of misinformation due to misunderstandings with these headlines.
Apparently, there's a lot of people going around, anytime this comes up saying this is nothing new. There's nothing new to the end users, who never cared. But this is going to make it hard for tinkerers to figure out shady shit Google is trying to pull.
GrapheneOS came out saying that they'll not be affected because they're planning to get OEM partners with access to internal branch. They've also mentioned they stopped reporting vulnerabilities to Google. Google doesn't want being bothered with fixing vulnerabilities. So there's that too
might be a concentrated PR attempt to downplay the change. idk
Google has shared more details on how AOSP will change after it makes Android OS development fully private
TL;DR