But to accept this principle to have to also accept that some people will take your code and use it in ways that you don't approve. The hope/belief is that the good will float to the top. If you don't accept this premise then you don't really have an open-source project.

I can't figure out why Android open sources its code, ever. They don't seem to care about contributions from the community, and they obviously don't want people using their code in ways they disapprove of. It seems that the major reason for open sourcing their code must be something else. What I keep coming back to is that it somehow protects them (in most cases) of patent violations.

I've asked this in the past: what is Andy Rubin's open-source credentials? What open-source projects has he been involved in during his long and successful career?

Google accepts a lot of patches from the community. Many of the major custom ROMs regularly submit patches. Things aren't perfect at the moment since all this infrastructure was hosted at kernel.org and is still down, so I can't link you directly to examples of public patch submissions and code review, unfortunately. But I can tell you they used Gerrit for that code review.

It's totally fine to develop closed source software! The problem is that if you market something that's actually closed as "open", you're being disingenuous.

Apple did the same thing with Darwin, but to their credit they started backing off on the "open source" marketing once it became clear that they were heading in that direction.

Also, a tiny nit about the headline - it's not open source until they actually release it. Who knows when that will be.

I have little doubt this was a major cause for Android crossing the chasm, so it does seem a bit disingenuous to only be "kind of" open.

Those things wont help android 'win' against the iphone, but it will be relevant in other markets, like the MIUI phone, wasnt that around 200$?

But trust me, of all the people I know who have android phones here in "Middle America" (off the top of my head without thinking too hard let's say more than 10), none of them bought them because of a techie brother in law raved about it being so cool because it was open. They all bought them because they wanted a smart phone and it was the one they were sold by the telco marketing. Period. (Okay, I'm up to more than twenty coming to mind just while thinking at the same time as typing, and still, none of them bought them because of the openness at all).

So yeah. While it's really marketing-speak to say that android is open in the sense that we all traditionally think of it, to google (and much more importantly to all the telco sales people) it means exactly squat as a selling point.

Which is why only people on HN (and Richard Stallman) get upset about it :)

They could have used some help from the opensource community to clean up the kludge....but they don't take pushes from anyone not Google.

Also: many potential contributors are scared off by the contributor license agreement required by AOSP. Patch contributions without the CLA can't even be reviewed.

As for not releasing honeycomb, look at releasing the kludged code from their perspective. They probably didn't want phones released from HC that wasn't ready for phone use, thus giving them a bad name when awful "Android Honeycomb Phones" hit the market.

Instead we have gems like the Transformer, Galaxy Tab, Xoom, etc. Seems to me that google made the right move. Soon they'll all have access to ICS anyway. Lets see how badly these other companies fuck that up with their crapware, questionable UI changes, and cheesy hardware (I believe Archos or some other company is still selling resistive screens). Even if they do, we already have an established set of decent tablet products.

Oddly it puts people off from contributing patches. Oddly!

I'm all for freely contributing to projects, but I will never assign my copyright to a corporation. A not-for-profit at least, but corporation, come on.

It's a big difference. I don't see anything wrong with CLAs, and there are (according to some more versed in IP than I) some really good reasons to never accept patches without CLAs, especially when you're a potential high-profile lawsuit target.

http://source.android.com/source/cla-individual.html

eg "Except for the license granted herein to the Project Leads and recipients of software distributed by the Project Leads, You reserve all right, title, and interest in and to Your Contributions."

> I'm all for freely contributing to projects, but I will never assign my copyright to a corporation. A not-for-profit at least, but corporation, come on.

The Mozilla committer's agreement, for instance, isn't that different in practice. You agree to specific licenses for your contribution (various shades of copyleft, MPL, GPL and LGPL) -- which amounts to anyone using that code being granted an irrevocable license -- but you retain copyright.

http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/committer/committers-agreemen...

Wasn't Honeycomb supposed to be a tablet-only OS? In which case, Google could have removed all cellular voice functionality, stated in the readme and release notes that this is intended for non-cellular phone devices only, and released it to the wild. Heck, they also could have refused to grant any usage of the Android trademarks to any manufacturer that used 3.1 source in a phone.

But in all honesty HC was a rush job (as was most of the hardware) to keep Android in the game against Apple. I'm really looking forward to it getting "there". With 2x the resources (CPU and RAM) of an iPad it should absolutely kill it, but when the applications hesitate for a split-second I really have to contemplate what the hell is going on?

Unfortunately, this is probably the biggest mistake that Google has made with Android. Google could have gone the route that the Mozilla foundation has with Firefox, where Mozilla does not allow modified Firefox source versions to use any of Mozilla's Firefox-related trademarks without their consent(http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html). If one does wish to use the Firefox source in an official way, Mozilla has a "Powered by Mozilla" mark that they grant out for people that use the source.

Google did not put such a policy in place with Android, which really limits their power with respect to "rogue" OEMs. Since they aren't charging for use of the OS, it's It has also led to the current issue that a lot of people have with pre-installed crapware or UIs.

Ideally, I think that Google should have created a "Powered by Android" mark that they could grant to anyone that follows certain restrictions, like full comparability with the Android App store, the ability to root the phone, multitouch, etc. That would help them to protect their brand, especially in this case, because it would allow Google to enforce any potential issues like trying to shoehorn a 7" tablet UI/OS onto a 3.5" phone. Also, like Firefox, it would not stop guys like Cyanogen, because they could still use some other public mark.

>'with Google' phones have been optimised for use of Google Mobile Services, providing easy access to Search, Voice Search, Google Talk, Google Maps, Gmail, Sync, YouTube and Android Market (where available).

And normal, non-branded phones are defined as:

>All phones in the Google Phone Gallery come with Android Market and Google Mobile Services such as Search, Google Maps and Gmail pre-installed.

What's the difference? There do not appear to be any real UX-related requirements, because Android 2.2 and 2.3 phones have the branding, some phones that use HTC sense have the branding(and others don't). Also, the Droid Incredible has the branding, but the Incredible 2 does not!

Sounds like their were embarassed about the quality of their code.

[1] http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

Because it's a closed-source Android variant that only works on specific devices.

Edit: Actually, that's beside the point. I think the reason they made Honeycomb is because they thought a lot of people would buy Android tablets, because a lot of people were buying iPads. But they were wrong about that.

I'm just saying, if they did it this way one time, there's no guarantee they won't do it again. How "open" it is, is really subject to Google's whim.