As a neat historical note, OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD partly over this: NetBSD's releases were BSD licensed, but were developed in secret. OpenBSD adopted a

As a neat historical note, OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD partly over this: NetBSD's releases were BSD licensed, but were developed in secret. OpenBSD adopted a public anonymous CVS server so anyone could watch development as it was going on. Apparently they were the first project to do this[1]. A step on the way to GitHub, today, where code is the first thing you see and can be forked with a click of a button. In 2012, development in public is so normal that I think it's completely fair to call Android less open than it could be. It's great that you can get the source code for Android's point releases (sometimes... 3.0 was completely closed-source, because Google said the code was too messy). But a code dump a couple times a year is not fully in the spirit of open source. [1] http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor_f/cranor_f.pdf http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix99/full_papers/cranor_f/cr... (pdf)