[blinkingled]

What you could not do is run the Aqua GUI or many of the default applications that come with a Mac bought in the store

Which isn't very useful at all. Android on the other hand allows you to run Market, Apps, Amazon Apps, your own in house apps on your device of choice by using the provided source code. You will have to write your drivers may be but that's not nearly the same as write your CF or Aqua or OpenGL implementation plus a ton of other things to make stock OS X apps works. That goes into practically impossible category.

So in other less terse wording - you can call Darwin open source but you cannot really call OS X open source.

[jballanc]

Sure, that's essentially my point: Parts of the Android stack are open and parts of the OS X stack are open. Whether or not the important parts are open depends on who you are. Take, for example, the other story on HN today about HTC finally opening their bootloader. That, to me, is much more important than any other part of Android being open.

[jamesgeck0]

"Open", in this context, means open source. HTC's bootloader has always been open source, as far as I know. It's been set up to only boot signed kernels, but that's "open" as in, "customers can modify their devices" not as in, "customers can view and modify the source code we put on the device."

HTC's locking the bootloader isn't exactly an issue with Android's openness. It's an issue with the openness of HTC.