Right after the precipitous price drop of the HP TouchPad to $99, whether someone would port Android to the newly-hot device wasn’t a matter of if but when.
Team-TouchDroid came out of the gate by stating they already had a plan in the works to bring Android 2.3.5 over to the TouchPad via the Android Open Source Project, but for a while nothing was heard from the team. Shortly thereafter, several members of CyanogenMOD started working on porting their software to the TouchPad, and the pseudo race began to see who could create a fully-functional port first.
Recently, however, members of CyanogenMOD accused Team-TouchDroid of stealing code. Drivers to make the touchscreen work were found to contain identical code to the version CyanogenMOD was building — code that did not exist before the porting began — and today this was verified by a TouchDroid member. As a result, work has been suspended, leaving the CM team as the only remaining crew bringing Android to the TouchPad.
While the drama was bitter at its height, it definitely goes to show the fragility of anonymous/nameless collaboration. Team-TouchDroid was never more than a ragtag bunch of people coding for the love of Android, but several members, especially the ones who ended up stealing the CM7 code without proper accreditation, brought down the whole enterprise.
Lets hope this doesn’t slow down development at all. The TouchDroid team has posted a system dump of their current progress, with instructions on how to install the minimally-working port. We will keep you updated on how the CM7 team is doing: it looks like rapid progress is being made.
Source: Team-TouchDroid
Via: Phandroid
