It sounds like the complaints against Android are [1] "Steering" discussions do not take place on a public mailing list (or community input is generally disreg

It sounds like the complaints against Android are [1] "Steering" discussions do not take place on a public mailing list (or community input is generally disregarded). Depending on the involvement of the community (in actually doing instead of bikeshedding) compared to the company, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I like open development, but if the community really has enough motivation, they are welcome to fork the project. Git makes it as easy as possible to migrate patches [2]. Some new development does not go into the public repo right away, instead residing in a private repo until some merge window prior to a major release. Keeping it in a separate repo is probably a good idea if the changes are likely to cause occasional breakage. Again, visible branches (and/or RFC patchsets on mailing lists, a la LKML), but they do have a rapid release cycle and the full history is available after it is merged. They don't hand out commit access to the community. Is there just no email address to git send-email your patch sets or to send pull requests? Or do they ignore patches that show up? That's just bad administration and it's easy enough to create a community fork. The specific complaint about outright commit privileges is silly, Linus does not hand out commit access to anyone (including Ingo, Alan Cox, Andrew Morton), instead he pulls from them when they are ready. I'm not trying to defend Google, they certainly have a history of being a poor to mediocre open source citizen. But "no different than iOS" is a gross exaggeration. Note that the carriers and hardware vendors may be far more to blame for the privacy, it's likely that they require limited-time NDAs so that branches cannot be made public until a release. [1] I don't have specific experience working with the Android git repository or trying to send patches upstream, so I don't know if the complaints are entirely factual. [2] It's not so rare for Open Source (adhering to the strict definition, but not open development, obviously) projects to only publish release tarballs. In contrast, Android publishes their repository with daily activity: http://android.git.kernel.org/?o=age http://android.git.kernel.org/?o=age