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Comment by icarus_drowning | Hacker News Reader

I also get a hint of "open for me but not for thee" here: we're supposed to believe the Android's openness (which began as an asset) is now a liability because carriers shouldn't be allowed to modify it.

So who is to be the judge of who gets to modify Android? Google? Jason Hiner?

He also mischaracterizes a lot of the modifications that have happened to Android: sure, the uninstallable NASCAR app on the EVO was decidedly crapware, but to simply lump the Sense interface in with it is a deliberate mischaracterization. (Especially after many reviewers noted that they believed Sense improved on stock on Android-- an opinion I don't share, but a debate worth having).

So my question is thus: does Jason Hiner think Google should rescind its open-source license for most of Android? Does he think that such a move would honestly be more "open" than it is now?

Because it certainly appears that he does.

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I think that the point is that you want open for the user but closed for the mobile providers.

Apple is closer than Android for sure, but it's also off-limits from the providers (well, mostly: they can still veto some apps). Android is open, but since before reaching the user it goes through the providers, the users get a much closed system.

This strikes me as a pretty contradictory position: why users but not mobile providers? The Apache license doesn't make that distinction, and as such, I fail to see why Google should.

They don't need to write it like that in the licence for it to be so in practice. A big help for example would have been to say that nobody can remove any rights that he has himself experience. So if it started open, it has to stay open. Mobile providers can modify it all they want but they can't actually control it then.

Sure, you can get root privileges and do it anyway, but they've tried to make it very hard and they'll probably continue. For geeks maybe that's not a problem, for the average person it is.

They don't need to close the source, just figure out some way to indicate to buyers that if they buy an Android phone, they're guaranteed to have a certain experience.

This seems like a much more balanced, nuance view of the scenario-- note that it is vastly different from "Android is closed because its open" tone present in the article-- or the insistence by some (see comment below) that providers not have access to the Android source.

EDIT: Some clarification and grammatical fixes.

Google does require certain things in order for it to get the Google branding. Currently this seems to be limited to including the core Google applications, but if google deems the rise of handset-specific frontends to be an issue perhaps they could expand the license requirements?

I, for one, don't see the proliferation of Motoblur/SamsungSense/HTC-Whatever to be a negative thing. It is an additional factor that consumers can use to differentiate between phones. One reason I own a DroidX is the great hardware, but another reason is I think the moto skin adds a lot in certain areas (it's calendar widget, for example).

In other words: let the market decide.

I'm sad to see that the market has apparently decided against Google's own offering. The prospects of a Google-controlled, Android reference phone available to all consumers on all networks was just plain nifty.

Having said that, I have several family members with HTC, "Sensified" Droid Incredibles, and it doesn't seem to be that bad. (Then again, there is no NASCAR app either...)

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