Google + Abelson = Free Android Software

On sabbatical at Google this spring, MIT EECS professor Hal Abelson PhD ’73 was busy liberating software. He’s behind the decision to offer a free Google App Inventor for Android, so individuals can write their own applications for the Android family of smart phones.

No programming is required for this drag-and-drop software, available since July 12.  You can start with games, then move quickly to more sophisticated uses such as developing quiz apps that ask questions using text-to-speech capacity.

“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” said Abelson, in a New York Times article. “We could only have done this because Android’s architecture is so open.”

Abelson is a legendary teacher and was instrumental in establishing OpenCourseWare (OCW) at MIT. He's a founding director of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Free Software Foundation, and a director of the Center for Democracy and Technology—organizations devoted to strengthening the global intellectual commons.

At MIT, he teaches an experimental course on Building Mobile Applications with Android and, on OCW, you can catch his Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier course, which looks at law, policy, and technology issues related to the control of the Internet.

Update: an Aug. 19, 2010, MIT News Office story chronicles the MIT roots of Google's App Inventor.