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I know perfectly well that Android is not under the GPL, and nowhere in my posts have I implied that it is, and I have also not implied that Google is under any

I know perfectly well that Android is not under the GPL, and nowhere in my posts have I implied that it is, and I have also not implied that Google is under any legal obligations whatsoever. The article which this entire discussion is based on is simply about whether or not Google is actually following through on their previous statements about Android, and about the fact that, as you just admitted, Honeycomb is not currently open source. I don't understand the distinctions you are trying to draw involving "the timing of the Xoom launch" because that is the essence of the issue: Honeycomb based devices are being sold without the source code being made available to the user, and Google states they are doing this on purpose and the situation will remain that way for some time. This is not compatible with the term "open source". The statement "Android is open source" is not the same as the statement "Older versions of Android are open source, but the most recent version is not."

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
If the Xoom had been delayed until after Honeycomb was open sourced in say 2 months, would that change the open source status of Honeycomb right now? Obviously no. The timing of the code release is what triggers that change. Honeycomb was exactly as open source the day after the Xoom went on sale as it was the day before. So why is the timing of the hardware release relevant? I thought you were getting confused with the GPL, in which case it would be relevant. Now that we've cleared up that you know Android isn't GPL I have no idea why you think the timing of the binary release matters. I'd hazard a guess that you think people should act like the GPL applies to their Apache licensed code in order to be considered sufficiently "Open Source" by your definition, which differs from the standard meaning of simply releasing the code under an Open Source licence, which applies to the vast majority of Android code, and will soon apply to the Honeycomb code. At which point they'll start work on the next version (Jelly?), and presumably you'll once again believe that Android isn't Open Source since having any code in development and not yet released fails your test. Or do they only fail your Open Source test if they ship a Jelly-powered device first? What if they ship a Jelly SDK image to run in a VM? Does your idea of when they have to have released source follow the GPL exactly, or does it differ in any important ways?

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

If the Xoom had been delayed until after Honeycomb was open sourced in say 2 months, would that change the open source status of Honeycomb right now? Obviously no. The timing of the code release is what triggers that change. Honeycomb was exactly as open source the day after the Xoom went on sale as it was the day before. So why is the timing of the hardware release relevant? I thought you were getting confused with the GPL, in which case it would be relevant. Now that we've cleared up that you know Android isn't GPL I have no idea why you think the timing of the binary release matters. I'd hazard a guess that you think people should act like the GPL applies to their Apache licensed code in order to be considered sufficiently "Open Source" by your definition, which differs from the standard meaning of simply releasing the code under an Open Source licence, which applies to the vast majority of Android code, and will soon apply to the Honeycomb code. At which point they'll start work on the next version (Jelly?), and presumably you'll once again believe that Android isn't Open Source since having any code in development and not yet released fails your test. Or do they only fail your Open Source test if they ship a Jelly-powered device first? What if they ship a Jelly SDK image to run in a VM? Does your idea of when they have to have released source follow the GPL exactly, or does it differ in any important ways?