"OpenVMS the only one word lie in the English language." -- Scott McNealy.

I find the 'heat' over this topic (as measured by column inches of ongoing debate) fascinating. I used the McNealy quote above because when I joined Sun in 1986 they had just gone public and they were championing "Open Systems."

As a concept this was pretty easy to explain, basically everything you needed to know in order to reproduce an equivalently functioning system was documented and unencumbered so that folks could create 'Sun compatible' Hard disks (Fujitsu Eagles were very popular) without paying a 'tax' to Sun. It also meant that as a company considering a significant investment in the technology, if Sun vanished tomorrow you had enough information to keep all your Sun gear running and third parties could continue to support it an create new peripherals for it, Etc. Eric Schmidt's first "real" management job was when he joined Sun and started heading up the systems group.

The 'open systems' tactic relies on the incumbent player staying 'closed' to protect their turf for as long as possible, and it makes the alternative credible for people who are putting investment capital at risk. In Sun's case it was getting big players to bet on an untested OS (SunOS) and in Google's case it was getting big players to bet on an untested phone OS (Android).

Had Google abandoned Android 1.6 and walked away, all the players at the time who were using it would have been able to still fix bugs and keep shipping handsets based on it without support from the big G.

Now Android is the 'dominant' smartphone OS (in terms of volume) at least, and there are lots of signs that Google is changing the model to 'closed' to protect its turf, just as Sun closed ranks around Solaris and its own CPU architecture (SPARC). But there is a problem, in that the dominant tablet OS is not Android. So for that market one might want to still be playing the 'open' card, but if its the same as the phone OS then we play the 'closed' card, and we end up with 'both open and closed.'

Google clearly wants Android to be successful. Whether or not you and I can get some, all, or none of the source is no doubt measured against that razor. It is impolitic of them to say to your face, "Look if you're not going to be making a million units a month we really don't care a whole lot what you think we should or should not be doing." but I am sure that if lying had not been invented that is exactly what they would say.

Google makes money, lots of it, and even when these conversations happen inside the 'plex there is the reality that leaving money on the table is never a long term strategy. Just like that free toaster for opening a checking account isn't really free.

I'll predict here today (and where perhaps Google's web crawler will be able to find it again in 5 years) that by 2016 it will be impossible to reload software on your phone if the original phone came with Goggle software but isn't sold by Google, whether they call it 'Android' or something else. Vendors will pay more to have the ability to limit your choices, Google will give them that capability to get paid more, the vendors will use that capability to limit your choices.