I'm assuming they made this change to combat forks that do little more than redirect the flow of data and money to themselves, eg. OPhone, Aliyun, Kindle Fire.

I'm assuming they made this change to combat forks that do little more than redirect the flow of data and money to themselves, eg. OPhone, Aliyun, Kindle Fire. I have little respect for them. But I'm more concerned with forks that do more than that - namely, ones that take Android and adapts it for formfactors and usage models beyond what it was designed for. WIMM takes Android into a wristwatch; Ouya, into a gaming console; Vuzix M100, into wearable computing. Each of them have their own specific SDKs and would amount to "fragmenting" Android, but for good reasons. (Hell, Google themselves are probably creating an incompatible Android fork with Project Glass!) I sure hope Google doesn't mess with those folks, as IMO they are the ones truly putting the openness of Android to good use.