"I'm calling your bluff, I don't think you have any counter-arguments to the article and you're leading with your best argument already: nitpicking one paragraph."
No, i'm just not bothering. Really.
For example: It quotes vic gundotra for why android happened, a man who literally was not at Google until after Android was released.
(and who Andy Rubin definitely did not give a shit about or chat with until much much later. Vic may have left an SVP, but he did not come in as one)
"But we had this discussion before and I pointed out that Google, an online services provider with zero mobile experience and no name recognition had a very poor chance of convincing manufacturers to go for their unproven, inferior to pretty much anything OS (including Symbian and Blackberry). They might as well have just licensed Windows."
It was definitely not inferior, but i'll ignore your opinion on this one and stick with the substance.
You conflate two pieces, one of which mattered, and one of which didn't:
"Google not charging a license for the OS and making it open source must have been a big part of what convinced them to pick Android instead. It's just very logical that they would be swayed by price and the possibility of changing Android if they wanted to."
The not charging was the main part of it (they actually mostly expect it to end up saving their low end from licensing fees), and yes, customization mattered. But ability for partners to have source is completely orthogonal to open sourcing.
In fact, most of the partners were heavily against open sourcing it, because they felt it would cause them to lose their value add. They also didn't want to have to deal with the compliance aspects of android OSS licensing even a little bit! They were also strongly against having to non assert patents.
I spent about a year of my life convincing htc and others it would be okay for them if we open source d it. (As mentioned elsewhere, because Andy wanted to help the world, not because it was critical to Google strategy). In fact, the open source release almost didn't happen at the same time as the SDK release, and was considered fairly secondary. The only critical piece was the compliance source.
So again, I don't know why everyone is so stuck on the open source. Closed source worked fine for partners, and still does. It's even what they want.
I'm going to state definitively a thing that is as true now as it was then:
The hardware manufacturers do not give a crap about Android being open source. They did not care then. They still don't care.
In fact, they still see it as a net negative. They want to be able to develop with Google in private branches that the other hardware manufacturers can't see.
I'm not sure why this is so provocative to people. It's not like you see these hardware manufacturers running around trying to be pillars of the OSS community.
In any case, I've said more than enough about this multiple times and I'm not going to spend more of a weekend arguing about this. You are welcome to rewrite history. Someday, I hope you are successful enough to experience this as well.