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> Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so. Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem. It's fair game -- if a hardware partner thinks that one of Google's competitors can provide a better Android fork, they are free to leave the Alliance and go partner with that competitor.

A good example of this is Amazon. They are doing this successfully.

Another example is OUYA.

And Aliyun OS And Baidu Yi May be even the newly funded CyanogenMod company

> Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem.

Imagine you want to sell a Linux laptop with your own Linux distribution. You're just a small shop in California, and you're shopping around to find a manufacturer for your laptops. And you find that anyone connected to Microsoft (Foxconn, Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, etc) can't do any job with you. Would you say "that's fair, Microsoft isn't evil by forcing hardware manufacturers to work exclusively with them" in such situation?

That's not what they're doing. HTC, Samsung, etc still sell non-Google OSs, like Windows Phone and Bada.

A good analogy would be Microsoft preventing you from selling your fork of Windows on those manufacturers, which happens to be exactly what every big OS maker does, by simply not distributing it under a Free license.

AOSP is so open that the previous AOSP leader at Google quitted over the lack of openeness.

That's a mischaracterization of his own comments on why he left. It had to do with open sourcing GPU drivers, which is probably an issue with other vendors, not Google.

See: https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/9HHRURor...

well actually while I get where you're coming from, that's still correct. if AOSP was more open he wouldn't have left. Google doesn't give a damn about openness right now.

"If AOSP were more open he wouldn't have left." Can you substantiate that statement at all? AOSP's "openness" is determined by its licensing, which is a standard Apache 2.0 license. The issue was whether certain vendors would contribute to AOSP under that license, not whether AOSP was open enough.

It was Google's choice to put that hardware into the phone, and it was their choice not to pressure qualcomm into being more open.

Your argument itself is also somewhat of a mischaracterization, because at least Google could have wrestled redistribution rights for the binary drivers, thus making AOSP actually usable on the nexus, and they didn't even bother with that.

Vendors are a convenient whipping boy when don't care about openness but wanna look like you do.

There's a very, very simple problem with your argument:

https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/drivers#razor

and here is the problem with yours, from the EULA:

     Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Licensor hereby grants to
     You, free of charge, a non-exclusive, non-sublicensable,
     non-transferable, limited copyright license, during the term of
     this Agreement, to download, install and use the Software
     internally in machine-readable (i.e., object code) form and the
     Documentation for non-commercial use on an Authorized Android
     Enabled Device and non-commercial redistribution for academic
     purposes only of a reasonable number of copies of the Authorized
     Android Enabled Device Software (the "Limited Purpose"). You may
     grant your end users the right to use the Software for
     non-commercial purposes on an Authorized Android Enabled Device.
     The license to the Software granted to You hereunder is solely for
     the Limited Purpose set forth in this section, and the Software

This makes it entirely impossible for AOSP to distribute the drivers

Blame mobile chipset vendors for that one.

> When someone like Github does this (make some parts of their code open-source, but others closed-source), journalists don't write critical pieces about them, do they?

Github don't constantly go on about how 'open' Github is, though.

True, but Github does use the halo of "Open Source" a lot to promote themselves (or others promote them using it..e.g. http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/github/) while overlooking the fact that most of their codebase is very close sourced indeed.

Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so

Not really. You will have your mainline Abdroid implementation shutdown if you do this. Google is clearly doing this to make forking a very risky proposition for device manufacturers. It's the antithesis to open.

Google used 'Android is open' as a dishonest slogan to convince developers that it wasn't just a power play.

That is why they are being criticized. It's not about who is more open. It's that Google misled everyone about their intentions.

Prove that Android is not open.

He meant free (as in freedom), not open. "Proof" of that is in the submission's article. It's not exactly a formal proof but it has convinced most people here.

Unfortunately, this highlights some weaknesses in the GPLv2, which is supposed to guarantee freedom.

Android largely isn't GPLv2.