| >This isn't about whether Android is open or not; it's about whether the way it is open is at all consistent with the way it's openness is marketed to end consumers. I keep hearing this, but can you demonstrate where Google has represented Android as the product of some vibrant and continuous interplay between the wider open source community and their own engineering teams? Interestingly enough, there's more of that going on than you're giving credit for. http://android.git.kernel.org/ isn't an iota of what it could be, but it's certainly more than an "occasional tarball of source". Look, I think what Google is doing with the periodic drops is pretty lame - but the Android software is open. More than that, they've tried to spur on some pretty radical freedoms - like my Nexus One which they convinced HTC to provide fully unlockable: a simple command and a warning screen away. This was unthinkable not so very long ago, certainly in smart phones. Frustratingly enough, the market wasn't interested, but they tried. And may well try to keep pushing that bar forward. But you'll give them no quarter - they are damned for not reshaping things to your preferred standards in one fell swoop, they are responsible for both the hardware and the regressive policies of every idiot vendor whose usage of the platform they bless. It's a bit overdone to say that "the openness is primarily for the benefit of handset makers and carriers who can use those tarballs". I'm interested in where you've acquired this insight into Google's treacherous true motivations, and I'm surprised to learn that it's so hard to take those "tarballs" and get them running on arbitrary hardware. That damned linux kernel, so notoriously hard to get running on variant hardware. When you get down to it, your real problem seems to be that Android strikes a fairly neutral deal, allowing the carriers and manufacturers to keep their freedoms too. They're free to try to turn back the clock, release terribly gimped phones, and just generally be the dicks that we have always known them to be. We're free to reject it, and should. |