> There are some seemingly nonsensical parts to the agreement, especially the prohibition against distributing an SDK derived from the Android SDK. I'm having

> There are some seemingly nonsensical parts to the agreement, especially the prohibition against distributing an SDK derived from the Android SDK. I'm having a difficult time imagining what harm that might cause. as somebody who has had to deal with vendor proprietary SDKs for devices, I can assure you that only having to deal with one stock Android SDK that has not been tempered with by hardware-engineers under time pressure doing software is a very, very good thing. This way the really ugly crap is contained within vendor specific SDK extensions (which can be abstracted away) instead of the crap being sprinkled all over the basic OS SDK which would require one SDK per device you're targeting and would inflict all sorts of bugs on you even when not touching vendor-specific parts. In general, most of the terms mentioned in the article are, while being horrendous for the device maker, are very nice for both users and developers targeting these devices. Yes, it's nowhere near "open", but also, yes, this ensures some level of quality for both users and developers.