Its worth noting that Cyanogen has changed his work to comply with Google: http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/29/cyanogen-android-rom-modd...

Of course he did. He did roughly the moral equivalent of redistributing MP3s, Google told him to knock it off, he did.

Not even close. This is the moral equivalent of putting a new muffler on your Honda. He is tweaking apps he purchased (all android phone owners have such a license) and distributing those tweaks to people who also have licenses for those apps. You have clearly drunk the kool-aid.

There are devices that do not ship with Android but can run it, like the OpenMoko Freerunner and numerous netbooks. So even if you assume that the license somehow trumps copyright, he could easily have been giving away the apps to people who are not licensed.

The more I think about this, the more frustrated I get.

Google is completely in the right, legally, but the licensing issue means that I have no way to legally exploit the open source nature of Android while also retaining crucially important applications, like the Android Market, Google Maps, or GMail.

Which, for me, means that I can never truly use my Dev Phone for both development, and as a phone. I have to choose between openness and proprietary software that makes the phone usable as a general device.

Commercial developers, however, through their license agreements with Google, are able to work with both of these components -- the open foundation and the closed applications -- to produce a complete package. I can only provide half of that.

Oh how I wish Google would make their applications otherwise available, as they do for S60 and other platforms. I don't mind being prohibited from redistribution, but give me a way to install those applications on my own.

What is the relationship between copyright infringement and Open Source???