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Comment by joehewitt | Hacker News Reader

That's a disappointing attitude. Let me give you a great counterexample.

Chrome was initially a completely fork of Webkit, but Google eventually chose to work with Apple and merge all of their changes to the Webkit trunk. This was only possible because Webkit, unlike Android, allows outsiders to commit.

The costs of maintaining a fork of a project as large as Webkit (or Android) are so huge, even Google didn't want to bear them for long. The benefits of the merge are huge for all users. Not only does Chrome continue to get Apple's changes downstream, like CSS transforms, but Safari gets Google's changes, like web sockets. In Android today, this sort of collaboration would be impossible.

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I just wanted to say thanks for the blog post. It conveyed a lot of the nuances that might not have come through in the tweets.

And while everything you say may be true, I still don't think most people care. In fact, I'm fairly certain most people don't care. Ask your average developer, much less consumer, the difference between Chrome and Android with respect to openess and you'll probably get blank stares.

Clearly Google doesn't think the benefits of public commits outweighs the costs, otherwise it would economically make sense. Additionally I suspect given the current state of mobile OS development vs browser development they probably realize that public contributions would be fewer and of less general utility than what we've seen with browsers.

I still think the fact that one can pick up Android, even if it is just 2.2 today, and build it, and port it to any device they want, and rip out any code they like, and add any code they like is a pretty reasonable definition of open -- at least given that openness is a gradient and not absolute term.

And while everything you say may be true, I still don't think most people care

Just because most people don't care doesn't mean it's not important.

When you're arguing about the definition of a word, in a natural language like English, what people care about actually is kind of important.

In the days before this site, when we poor cave-developers had to get our news from places like Slashdot, there were regular huge flame-fest threads complaining about Apple's lack of "openness" with WebKit. Sure, you could download it, there was code under an OSI-certified license, but they were TERRIBLE HORRIBLE BAD NO-GOOD COMMUNITY MEMBERS because of how they treated the upstream KHTML project they'd started from.

Why was it wrong -- so wrong that they were bullied into changing their process -- for Apple to behave this way, wrong enough to get so many people worked up, so many people to care, when Google engages in the same sort of "open license, closed project" behavior and get a pass?

... And while everything you say may be true, I still don't think most people care. In fact, I'm fairly certain most people don't care. Ask your average developer, much less consumer, the difference between Chrome and Android with respect to openess and you'll probably get blank stares. ...

and what subset care about:

the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

A much bigger subset. Although even that misses the larger point.

Probably the most useful part of the Android story is side-loading. After that the ability to host Android on any device I like. After that the ability to add or remove any part of Android I like. At somet point we eventually get down to something like public commits, but that's far below things like ability to audit and escrow code.

Again, I'm not saying that the things Joe wishes for are bad things. But the absence of them does not make something closed.

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