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As an untrained reader, I find this very strange. Not open sourcing your products could be a reason to forbid a merger, because you could gain an advantage over your competitors? Really? Is it illegal to be better than your competitors?

It almost sounds as if there was a law that companies have to open source their products, which I am pretty sure does not exist (IANAL, though).

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Google does open source Android. The point is about when they make a public release of the source. They are only obliged to release the source when they release the code to the public, and the point is that they don't do this any earlier than they have to.

This does make the Android development process less than open. It does not stop Android being open source.

The relationship to the court case is that Google's development process is very much at question in the issue of whether there is a violation of Oracle's IP.

I don't think they are obliged to do anything.

Word and Excel had an unfair advantage over Wordperfect and lotus 1-2-3 because Microsoft had a quasi-monopoly over the operating system. At some point a judge had even decided Microsoft should be split into an os company and an application company.

http://www.economist.com/node/593691

The situation is very different with android, but the analogy is obvious.

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