not an expert in this area, so I won't comment on the accuracy of your claims, but your comment is full of ad hominem vitriol. please keep it civil, whether you agree or not. HN is better than this.

Ad hominem? I am specifically criticizing the comment, so yet another showing of some ignorantly misplaced Latin isn't worthwhile.

Yes, you're criticising the comment, but your criticisms constitute mainly of strong attacks on its tone (ultra-polarized, hysterical, noisy, prattle) and perceived effect (manipulative, obnoxious), plus some extremely strong contradictions without supporting evidence of matching strength (utterly and complete wrong, does not belong on HN).

I do think that you're probably correct with the meat of what you're saying, but there's no question that at best half of your comment is relevant to the actual discussion and the other half describes itself at least as well as it describes the comment it purports to.

My suggestion: your vitriol should be proportional to the strength of the evidence you present rather than to the strength of your feeling.

While technically your comment isn't an ad hominem since you attribute all these terrible things to the comment rather than the person, I can completely see why it rang a lot of the same bells as an ad hominem argument would for some people.

You're right, it's not ad hominem, but your post is chock full of overly emotive (read, manipulative) language. To illustrate, I'll remove the emotive language and you can see the difference:

>Android is no longer meaningfully open, other than a years old core of basic functions.

This is wrong, and things I think are wrong don't belong on HN. I suspect you weren't voted down because of the (logically fallacious) appeal to consequences.

Just to be clear, Google has always had closed source, proprietary Google bits (gmail, maps, etc. Originally they even built these as a big binary blob in the platform image, and it was "fixing fragmentation" when they moved them to separate apps), and the open source Android bits. Everything you heard about Android 4.3 is in the open source bits.

what obnoxious, noisy prattle! (lol)

This is the sort of hysterical comment that does not belong on HN, to quote you.

The problem is that people have built false expectations for themselves about what Android is, and even created false definitions of what open source is. All Android is is the operating system. Take any Linux distro, and strip out all the applications bundled with it and you don't have much. All open source means is that you can legally fork it.

People have created their own definitions for these things on no basis. There's a reason why there are so many terms in the open source world. There's Open Source. There's Free software. There's Free and Open Source software. They all mean different things, and the reason we nerds have so many definitions is precisely to avoid these kinds of misconception and false expectations. Ironically they've become complicated enough that everyone else ignores their definitions.

This is 100% correct. The google apps have always been proprietary, custom roms for example arent allowed to include them.