"a glance at your comment history ... an obvious bias and it's apparently affecting your ability to comprehend or something)."
I could say the same for yours. Let's be clear since I'm being accused of being some sort of one dimensional Android hater:
I like Google. I like Android. I like the openness of Android. I also and sometimes especially like several of the non-Open parts of Android (Maps and Gmail are the gold standard in mobile, Marketplace needs work but they iterate fast, Music and Movies look great and have probably sold me on an Android tablet if/when I get one). I have no problem with Google's location services, as far as I know they are the best in the world. I have no problem with them muscling out Skyhook, that's how business works. I have no problem with Google using compatibility as a club, and as in the case of timely updates they need a bigger club (they know this and are iterating quickly as usual).
Here's the difference: what I have a problem with is claiming that all of Android is this free and open promised land while you're muscling people out at the same time. That's just willful ignorance of what Google and Android (in its totality) are.
You can claim that "Android in it's entirety" is just the open source pieces but at that point we're just talking past each other and should agree to disagree. Is Honeycomb not Android? Would not every review point out that you don't get "the full Android" from a device lacking Google's suite of non-Open Source apps from a device shipping without "Android compatibility"? Since you continually question my reading comprehension use your superior skills and tell me what this quote from Android's wikipedia means: "device manufacturers can not use Google's Android trademark unless Google certifies that the device complies with their Compatibility Definition Document (CDD)"
So we're at this point in the conversation already. I guess we've really been in it sometime, as you continue to drag Gapps and Skyhook around like they support your point and now apparently we're involving trademarks too. Oh well, here it goes:
Mozilla owns the Firefox trademark and controls who can use it. Google does that with Android. Surely you're not suggesting that anyone should be able to use trademarked names of other products just because their source is GPL/MIT licensed...
As for everything else, it's just you talking past me or over me: I'll repeat it, Android and Google Apps are two completely different products. Your attempts to use Google Apps to discredit Android's openness is dishonest, disingenuous and just weak. Android is free and open and Google muscled them out of Skyhook by threatening to withold Google Apps. Android is free and open; still, completely regardless of that statement. Gmail is not part of Android. Calendar is not part of Android. They're irrelevant at this point in this discussion. Dude, I even granted that the Market missing would be detrimental to the sale of any Android device, but that's STILL completely ancillary to Android's openness.
Android is all MIT and GPL. RedHat does development behind closed doors. So does Canonical. Hey, guess what Novell does? Does that make their core Linux product any less "open"? Certainly not by any technical standard. Does Canonical operating a paid channel in the Ubuntu Software Center mean Ubuntu is no longer open?
Heh, as for my comments, the first two pages don't even touch Android, there's a complaint about WebGL in iOS, but Android doesn't even have WebGL at this point, so it's not like it was fan-based by any means. I like Android but think Google is screwing themselves in about 5 different ways and I think we'll look back at WebOS as damn near visionary. I won't lie and say that I like iOS, because I don't, I can't stand the user experience, but the quality of the app store and the graphics are smoother than I've seen in any pre-mid-2010 Android phone. I'm a big fan of competition, but I'm also a huge fan of OSS and I just don't understand the need for people to try to cut down Android and make it seem like Google's little prized possession (not to say that it isn't, by any means), but if that's bad... what does it mean for Apple/iOS?
Sounds "open" to me.
"a glance at your comment history ... an obvious bias and it's apparently affecting your ability to comprehend or something)."
I could say the same for yours. Let's be clear since I'm being accused of being some sort of one dimensional Android hater:
I like Google. I like Android. I like the openness of Android. I also and sometimes especially like several of the non-Open parts of Android (Maps and Gmail are the gold standard in mobile, Marketplace needs work but they iterate fast, Music and Movies look great and have probably sold me on an Android tablet if/when I get one). I have no problem with Google's location services, as far as I know they are the best in the world. I have no problem with them muscling out Skyhook, that's how business works. I have no problem with Google using compatibility as a club, and as in the case of timely updates they need a bigger club (they know this and are iterating quickly as usual).
Here's the difference: what I have a problem with is claiming that all of Android is this free and open promised land while you're muscling people out at the same time. That's just willful ignorance of what Google and Android (in its totality) are.
You can claim that "Android in it's entirety" is just the open source pieces but at that point we're just talking past each other and should agree to disagree. Is Honeycomb not Android? Would not every review point out that you don't get "the full Android" from a device lacking Google's suite of non-Open Source apps from a device shipping without "Android compatibility"? Since you continually question my reading comprehension use your superior skills and tell me what this quote from Android's wikipedia means: "device manufacturers can not use Google's Android trademark unless Google certifies that the device complies with their Compatibility Definition Document (CDD)"