A lot of mythical things floated by the last few days.So lets set the record straight. First is there anyforks of android? as that would count towards a definition of open as you cannot grab source and do your own thing with it if its closed.
OPhone is an android OS dtisrubition with its own addedstuff such as wap and web widgets that follows a different release schedule and has different OEM, mobile operators, etc members. At this point It could be called a fork in that not everything added to it gets submitted back to the android project. Thus, this one point of proof thatandroid open as you can fork it.
OSes are a little different than some small timeapplication developer’s repo or even a applicationserver repo. There are levels of access in which the independent low level developer will not alwayshave access to the new inner core stuff that mighthappen to be in a separate trunk from the main trunk.
Now at some point people have forgotten that at timesSymbianOS worked like this when it was open. Guess what elseworks this way? Some other distros based on Linux andthey are still called open. Guess what else works thus way?Apple’s own Darwin Server,and its still called open.
When Google feels that Honeycomb isready to be in the open trunk they will dothe commit. Android is still open as it ever was.
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