It's kind of amusing to me how every now and then someone proclaims that Google has "lost control" of Android and how this must be some kind of crisis and portends a looming disaster.

Then we will have a series of people proclaiming how Android is not really open and what a farce Google's pretense of openness is, and what fools we were to ever believe that Google intended to make an open source operating system.

Frequently this will be followed by people lamenting "fragmentation" and demanding that Google put a stop to it by putting tight controls on who can implement Android and how they can do it.

These are all different sides of the same coin. Openness = fragmentation, openness = loss of control, openness = diversity, choice, innovation and endless possibility. It has benefits and downsides to be sure, but to think Google didn't know they were giving up some control of Android when they released it as open source is absurd - open sourcing something is by definition giving up control of it.