(Image Source: Flickr)

BY JIM FLINK

Ready for a big holiday helping of ice cream sandwich? Venture Beat explains -- Android 4.0 has been released -- into the wild.

“Ice Cream Sandwich is the latest Android OS, and it’s primarily known for two things: uniting the disparate worlds of different forks for different devices, and featuring a beautiful new design language that both consumers and app makers are sure to approve.”

What might be more noteworthy? Ice Cream Sandwich has an open source code. Which means you can modify it onto any device. Here’s the message from Google.

“This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases. However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich.”

And lots of people -- are -- focusing on it.  Salivating.  Tech Crunch notes, it’s time to make an ice cream run.

“The open sourcing of ICS will allow manufacturers who aren’t working directly with Google to pump out tablets of their own ...And it also means that custom ROM developers ...can tweak the code, port it to older devices, and more.”

And that’s not to mention phones, e-readers, and just about everything else. Can you say scalability? The Verge weighs in.

“That's big news for the Android community at large, since it's the first step on a long road to making Ice Cream Sandwich ports for every device under the sun …”

ZDNet suggests -- Google just might be looking out for itself here. The company is still weathering antitrust scrutiny from the FTC.

“...it seems pretty transparent that they only did it for fear that Google’s rushed Motorola Mobility buy coupled with the closed Google Android 3.0 release tree would intensify the scrutiny on the search giant at a time when it can’t afford much more of the legal spotlight.”

Computerworld, citing numerous reports notes, both ICS and the new Nexus could launch within the week.