I disagree. I agree that Android fulfills the license requirements of open source. But it delivers few of the practical benefits that were meant to stem from the term (control of your devices/computer, the ability to modify the software you use). So in spirit it is nothing like what we would traditionally call "open source" and it is certainly nothing to brag about vis-a-vis iOS.

I see no sense of entitlement in his complaints at all. They seem reasonable based on the difference between what I might expect from an open source project and what Google actually delivers. This is rare considering I tend not to like open source software or even the basic principle of it.

We can fork and alter the code, and deploy it to our devices. I'll grant that it is not easy on some devices, but you can't argue against the carriers' right to change the code without compromising your own.

That's just shifting the goal-posts, though.

Google touts the Android platform's openness as a benefit for developers and end-users.

And yet:

As a developer, I have, if anything, less visibility into upcoming changes to the Android SDK than I do into upcoming changes in iOS 4.2.

As an end-user, Android's openness hasn't stopped carriers from foisting unremovable crapware on me, or given me any more control over my Droid X than I have over my iPhone 4.

But whenever anyone dares to point out this disconnect between Google's marketing rhetoric and reality vis a vis openness, suddenly "open" means nothing more than "fulfills the letter of the contractual agreements of the GPL version 2 and provides no promises of anything beyond that". It's farcical.

>As a developer

As a developer, your customers can run the app even if the app store says no.

>As a customer

As a customer, you can choose from a range of android powered devices including those not approved by Google. The nook would likely not exist were it not for Android.

As a developer, if my app doesn't make it into the main app store, I'd be throwing good money after bad by trying to run about trying to set up my own payment infrastructure and trying to convince people to buy and side-load my app (which, among other things, Android's openness would keep AT&T Android users from doing anyways). From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as a developer.

As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un-appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.

Openness is only a virtue if it has practical benefit. If Google is arguing for openness from a purely dogmatic, non-practical standpoint, then they should be honest about that instead of pretending that Android's openness is some kind of unicorns-and-candyfloss fun ride for app developers and end-users.

>As a developer, if my app doesn't make it into the main app store, I'd be throwing good money after bad by trying to run about trying to set up my own payment infrastructure and trying to convince people to buy and side-load my app (which, among other things, Android's openness would keep AT&T Android users from doing anyways). From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as a developer.

Or support it with ads?

>As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un-appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.

This seems no different to me than any other free market. I buy the argument that Google should simplify your purchasing decision by being more selective with the trademark, but that's an entirely different argument than the one we are having.

How "open" is a device whose OS has been configured so that you cannot remove certain applications from it?

Sure the original OS is open source (and "open" as in visible), but how open is the platform when some companies put chains and locks around it?

I can see how in Google's eyes the core platform is open - code is public, it can be forked, etc. But it's still an environment in which some vendors are free to lock down the system they sell to end-users to the point where a user is no longer free to uninstall programs they don't want. This dilutes the "openness" of the overall platform, since the lack of freedom and control on some Android devices reflects on the average perception of Android.

>How "open" is a device whose OS has been configured so that you cannot remove certain applications from it?

Is linux not open because the PS3 exists? It seems like all of your arguments apply equally well there.

The difference is that Sony isn't running around marketing the PS3 as being superior to the XBox because of its "openness". Nor is Kaz Hirai tweeting about cloning Sony's Linux kernel repo as if it were some notional benefit over the XBox for consumers.

So you're now taking the position that how open Android is can depend upon how they have marketed their openness, and how misleadingly they may have done so? That's nonsense. At the end of the day, "fork it, mod it, build it, deploy it to any device that will run it" still applies. That's unavoidably and factually open. Radically so, given where this particular market was just 3-4 years ago.

I'm astonished at how muddled and downright bizarre the argumentation on these threads gets. Yes, they don't develop future platform versions in the open, they just make delayed code dumps. Annoying. But hardly "open"-negating. The process may not be open - the deliverables are. And all of the usual advantages of that open are in full effect with Android and its many, many active mods.

Yes, carriers are free to add unremovable shovelware, to try and prevent flashing with the aid of the hardware manufacturers - all that nasty stuff they are free to do with any apache/bsd-licensed codebase. It's very hard to understand how this is Google's fault, or why it somehow renders the underlying platform "not open". Should they have stridently disallowed such behavior from day 1? I'm guessing that would have left them with a lot fewer partners, and a go-nowhere platform, but hey, at least they would have been pure as the driven snow ideologically.

Saying with a straight face that Android is "not open", "not meaningfully more open than iOS", "nothing like what we would traditionally call open-source", and so on is ridiculous hyperbole. The only interest I take out of these instant train wreck threads is in playing a game: guess at what horses individual commenters have in the mobile race, that their perceptions can become so severely distorted.

My consistent position is nothing more than that Android is not open in a way that is consistent with any of the claimed benefits Google or other Android promotors have asserted it provides.

It's certainly open from a perspective of "you get the occasionally tarball of source". Nobody is debating that. 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.

For the vast majority of users that openness, from any practical standpoint, might as well not exist. The popular, high selling handsets are simply too locked down for them to benefit from anything anyone does with those tarball drops.

Which is fine, but it's certainly not the way people paint the platform when they talk about how much better Android is for the user thanks to its openness, because the openness is primarily for the benefit of handset makers and carriers who can use those tarballs.

For what it's worth, I think this whole game of treating a thriving market like its some kind of horse-race is ridiculous. 90% market share was an aberration in the PC market; there's going to be room for multiple competitors for decades to come. There are no sides. Nobody is going to win anything.

>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.

There's another difference: most of the PS3 software is very much closed, whereas most of Android's is open source. You don't just get the kernel, you get pretty much everything else you need to make a phone work. That's pretty impressive.

Those actually _are_ benefits for many android devices, but not some.

Yeah, its really a pleasure seeing all these people (Jobs especially) argue for the GPLv3 and against tivoization. Where were they in 2007..

Well, in 2007, Jobs was just barely able to get one carrier to surrender some control to the handset manufacturer. The iPhone would have been a non-starter if Jobs had been asking for all control over the software to be surrendered to the consumer.

"...or given me any more control over my Droid X..."

Why did you buy the wrong phone? It was all over the news, that Motorola locks down the bootloader. How is that Googles fault? How does that make Android less open?

What about all those Linux boxes with locked bootloaders? How do they make Linux less open?

You can't always deploy your altered versions to your devices. Carriers have been experimenting with various techniques for locking down devices that have been rooted in any way, and the only completely unlocked Android phone (Nexus One when sold through Google) was a flop.

If your reply to this is that you can always bypass whatever DRM they put in place: well, you can do that on the iPhone too. And if you're willing to count something as "open" when reverse engineering is required to use modified software, then the availability of source code for a reference implementation ceases to be a meaningful difference. Android is no more "open" than iOS under that definition, just easier to work on.

You mean: You can't deploy your altered version to any device

Assuming you did not break it while altering. Then you can always deploy your altered version to the ADP-Phones. For example the Nexus One. And this is not a theoretical possibility. I have done it. It works. I use it every day since.

Open is not the same as "open, if you run it on special developer hardware". The Android platform cannot really be said to be open if none of the consumer products based on it are open.

The Nexus One is a consumer product. You do not have to be a developer to buy it nor is it special developer hardware.

Those other devices are still closed because people still buy them. Vote with your wallets and you will have freedom.

The easiest way to find one depending on your location might be ebay.

There are a lot of new & unused N1s on ebay.de and ebay.com

So then by that logic Linux itself isn't open, because manufacturers run it on locked set-top boxes.

With a bit of work you can probably get Android to run on commodity hardware.

Those manufacturers are not touting their locked set-top boxes as being an open platform...

I am with you here. The manufacturers should not be allowed to call their phones open if they lock the bootloader so you cannot install unsigned images.

But Android as a platform is still open. The same way that Linux is still open.

Are they? Does HTC, Samsung, etc. actually claim that their phones are "open"? It's Google calling Android open.

"But it delivers few of the practical benefits that were meant to stem from the term (control of your devices/computer, the ability to modify the software you use)."

Of course it does. A lot of people I know run community mods of Android of their phones, or at least used to do so for a while. Cyanogen seems to be a popular choice: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

That some phone vendors choose to make it difficult to install your own version of Android is not the fault of Android. Maybe Android could have a license that forbids the practice, but it would be debatable if that would be more or less open. Also I'd argue that if you care enough to install your own custom OS, then you are likely able to figure out which phone to buy (ie Nexus One).

It seems however that the "only publish source code of releases" poses a problems for vendors considering releasing Android based hardware. It probably gives Google at least a little bit of leverage.

Which might be a good thing - most anti-Android people seem to complain that Google is not able to exert enough pressure on manufacturers to maintain quality standards.

You have all that freedom with Android. You have the control over your device with Android. You don't have it on every device. But how is this Googles fault?

Android is so open it can be closed down by anyone. But there are Phones that are not closed down (ADP1, Nexus One) and hopefully there always will be.

Just because customers choose to buy phones that are locked down does not mean that Android is less open.

If Google actually cared about Android being open, they would have used GPLv3, to ensure that it stays open. In reality, they simply couldn't negotiate with carriers as well as Apple, so they've chosen to re-frame their capitulation as "openness".

Likewise, if Linus cared about Linux being open, he would have supported switching the kernel to AGPLv3....

Likewise, if the FSF cared about glibc being open, they would have switched the library to AGPLv3....

Thats a philosophical question.

Which is more open? GPLv3 or Apache/BSD license?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_and_GPL_licensing#Permissiv...

Apache has more restrictions than the BSD license ... why are you grouping the two of them together?

Both are permissive.

Control of your devices falls under the carrier, not Google. Blame the carrier if you can't re-flash your phone to your heart's content. You certainly can modify the base OS, with the exception of a handful of binaries. If the binaries in question (Gmail, YouTube, the market) bother you that much, there is nothing to stop you from writing your own versions.

I think you are confusing OEM and Mobile Operator missions with open source..they are not that same..Joe makes the same logical mistake in this debate..

I think you are confusing what actually matters.

If I were to walk up to RMS and say I've got a Free Software mobile platform, but that the hardware/firmware is designed to brick itself if you start customizing the OS, and that it comes loaded up with non-Free software that you can't remove without finding a way around the firmware bombs, would he hail it as a grand advance for freedom?

"The hardware". You mean The Android Phone? The only one out there?

He'd probably also complain about mobile phones in general for other reasons ("portable surveillance device", etc...)

I'm not RMS though, and Android is 'pretty good', if not perfect. If there's something better out there in terms of open source and open development, then let's hear about it.

Your post is the reason GPLv3 was created if I understand some of its intentions properly.

I agree. Joe can be somewhat of a whiner. Every time he's on the news, it's probably because he whines and complains about something (Apple app store policy, the state of web development, Android openness, etc.)