The Android community is gearing up for the release of the next version of the operating system in the form of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and today we have news that the software’s source code has been released to AOSP and has made a promising start.

As an article over at GSM Arena is reporting Google developer Jean-Baptiste Queru, otherwise known as JBQ, has revealed on Google Groups that the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean source code is being made available to the Android Open Source Project. The tagged release is titled as android-4.1.1_r1, and the development branch is named jb-dev.

Currently the binaries that are being released for the Galaxy Nexus and the Google Nexus 7, but will soon be also released for the Motorola Xoom and the Nexus S. The good news is that if you look to someone such as CyanogenMod for your custom Android ROMs, you can expect to see a Jelly Bean based ROM quite soon as developers can now get to work on it, as they now have the source code.

It has to be remembered that Google is only providing the source code for now, and will not mean that you will receive the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean over the air update to your Nexus device just yet. This is still down for a release around the middle of this month, and will be followed by the uploading of the factory images on Google’s site.

In the thread after JBQ’s post some users asked when the Nexus devices will be treated to OTA updates of Jelly Bean, but Queru stated that this information couldn’t be provided on the thread, but he did state that the Xoom and Nexus S binaries would become available “to approximately match the timing” of the OTA updates.

Google is pushing Jelly Bean as a smoother experience compared to Ice Cream Sandwich, and there are a number of new stand out features of the software, but let’s hope it rolls out quicker than ICS did in the coming months.