Seiously guy, go away. I'm so tired of hearing this. Android is open, Google apps are not. You can download the source for Android right now, modify it freely, and put it on a device. It may not be as open as some Linux distros, in that not everyone can submit code that will make it in to the official distro, but it is still open.

I don't see any problem with saying that Android is not an open system. They use open source, but the way it is distributed takes away many of the freedoms of OSS. Also, most of the system is really in the Apps, many of which are closed source. In other words, Android is as much open source as the iOS is, because it is based on an open source kernel but the user space is full of non-open components. And good luck trying to contribute something back to the owners of the system...

> Android is as much open source as the iOS is

I didn't realize iOS was open source! Where can I get the source?

>the way it is distributed

Oh really? http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html

That's an old version of Android. The current version is not open to anyone but Google employees.

It may not be the development trunk, but it's not an "old version". It's the latest release, 4.1.1.

Eh, releases are arbitrary points in the development cycle. There is new, stable, stuff in the dev trunk today, we just don't get to see it.

I don't see any difference between Google code-dumping (because that's all they do) "releases" of Android and iD Software open-sourcing old versions of idTech. iD is just more honest about it.

An open source project only requires that you can see the code, not that you can see what any one person or team is working on at any given moment.

Calling Google dishonest for making the latest released version of Android available seems disingenuous, at best.

If you remove the community-based aspect from open source, there is not much of an advantage in it. This idea of regular code-drops seem just like a way of maintaining the minimum requirements to conform to the open source tag.

In fact, many of the FSF's own open source projects had closed-off development processes from the start with only periodic source drops available.

Android's system for public contribution looks good to me: http://source.android.com/source/submit-patches.html

If you'll look at a few recent commits in the Android code-review system, you'll see quite a few non-Google email addresses: https://android-review.googlesource.com/

Right now, you can install applications distributed by non-authorized third parties onto many Android systems, and you cannot do so on any iOS system without jailbreaking. There are many other important meanings of "open" which Android may or may not satisfy, but those aren't what's being discussed here.

I can side load apps on my Android device. I can install things like Cyanogenmod. How is this not more open?

I think you're right, and that sideloading (which is really just normal loading, as people have done since the dawn of computing) is the most important test of openness for a platform. If you can write a program, and hand it to me somehow, and I can install it - and the platform developer doesn't have a veto over it - that means the platform is open.

Platform openness is really important, too. It means that people can write and share applications that the platform developer may not approve of - benchmarks, secure network code, games with controversial content - the list goes on.

That isn't to claim that an open source platform isn't a good thing. But open closed-source platforms have been a huge boon to the world since the dawn of computing, while closed closed-source platforms are problematic.

I'm not going to debate absolutes, but it is patently obvious that Android is relatively more open than iOS or Windoze by such an immense margin that your statement seems, well... asinine. Could it be better? Yes, absolutely. But, given the BS business model that Microsoft has always had (which is really the same for Apple, though they are better at marketing), Android is a hippie commune by comparison.

What do you think about the prospect of Gecko?