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Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand these "Google Android is not open" arguments. Can you go to http://source.apple.com/ and download iOS 1.0? No. Can you go to http://source.blackberry.com/ and download their OS? No. Sure, Honeycomb isn't coming out right this very moment, but at least there's something there.

By any definition Google is at least several orders of magnitude more "open" than Apple. Apple releases no source (other than what is required of them, and only after a few weeks or months). Google releases all source (sure, after a few weeks or months).

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  > I don't understand these "Google Android is not open"
  > arguments. Can you go to http://source.apple.com/ and
  > download iOS 1.0?

What iOS has to do with it? Did Apple ever claim or market iOS as being open source? Can you go to source.google.com and download Honeycomb source?

Apple doesn't hammer its competitors over the head with moralistic claims about how 'open' they are. Google does.

However, I will point out that some of Apple's open-source work (Webkit) is far more widely used than anything Google has done with Android.

You do realize that Android's browser is built on webkit, yes?

I'd think that would strengthen the point.

That said, I'm sure you could argue over who gets to claim WebKit as their own these days since I've seen a few people refer to it as "Google's WebKit" since they surpassed Apple in checkins at some point (or had for a month at least, it's not something I care to follow that closely).

The fact that Google does more work on it would tend to weaken the point. Also, the fact that Google is using Apple's software tends to undermine the Team A vs Team B regime that's the premise of most of these discussions.

That would be my point. Practically all post-2007 phones and tablets depend on Apple's open-source work. It's easily the most important application on mobile devices. Had Apple decided to roll their own proprietary browser instead of extending an open-source project, they would have a far bigger lead over the competition. And they did it without a lot of crowing about how moral it made them.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/

Your link was wrong.

That doesn't make his statement any less true. The link you provided only covers open source software that Apple included in their OS, and doesn't come close to including all iOS source code.

Apple doesn't claim to be open.. Google does

Translation: "Android is open*".

Agreed. The argument is a straw man.

Even taking the (flawed) premise at face value, there is still a mile of difference between Apple's walled garden for apps and other content, versus the Android ecosystem.

It's my impression that Google itself made Android's openness part of their marketing pitch. Then of course there's Andy Rubin's famous tweet:

https://twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429

If they're going to make openness an issue, it seems like it's fair to criticize them if they fail to live up to their (implied?) promises.

You're playing on two different meanings of the term "open". Because Android might not qualify as OSS, they create the implication that it's just as tightly controlled as Apple's walled garden. But that's not even close to true.

The point of the OP's argument seems to be something like "Apple isn't open, and now this proves that Android isn't open either; hence, Apple and Android are the same in this respect". This argument is fallacious.

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