Bit of an inaccurate title there - honeycomb will not be open sourced until they decide it's ready. Android is still open.
Oh, and Steve Jobs has already been vindicated by selling billions of dollars of tech.
Oh, and Steve Jobs has already been vindicated by selling billions of dollars of tech.
That is a difference on the spectrum of openess, and on that measure Chrome or Ubuntu has always beaten Android. The only difference for Honeycomb is the time between device and code reveal.
It's a bit of a philosophical question as to whether changing that 2 week delay to a 2 month delay moves you from "open" to "closed".
My main problem with Android is that you do not see any of the development that lead to Honeycomb. Even if you are interested, there is no way to see where the project is going without being on the inside. Android has a completely closed development cycle until _after_ the release of the first devices. I cannot consider that 'open' in a general sense.
I think the point that people want to make is that all competitors of Android are even more closed down.
However, it's "the best we've got", and all things considered, it's pretty good: Google could have kept many things much more tightly controlled and still been somewhat 'open' (see Windows vs Mac).
Steve Jobs harping about it though is sort of nonsensical: great, pick your nit, but to really make me stand up and care, go them one better, which is something he will never, ever do.
Huge chunks of OS X are open source. It's not necessarily equivalent to throw it into the same box as Windows (there are no "open" forks of a Windows based OS, but there are of Darwin, and FreeBSD has benefited from Apple as well.)
Not really. Android is a complete system, with a kernel, libraries and the whole GUI on top of that. Darwin is just the kernel, and I think they've sort of phased out doing much with the 'open source' aspect of it.
If it was my platform, I know, I'd like to be first to market with well built tablets rather than a bunch of mediocre tablet attempts, which could reflect badly on the platform itself.
That ship has sailed.
Not to mention there are several versions of android. There's the public version which is a little behind. There's the cutting edge version that members of the OHA get and if they follow their contract they get google-branded apps (gmail, youtube, maps, market, etc).
Dunno, seems much ado about nothing. They didn't give market access or gmail branded apps to the previous garbage tablets released so far. This is just google trying to stop this wave of horrible half-assed tablets from destroying the android tablet market. It may be too late, but leaving dozens of manufacturers selling non-capacitive touch screen based tablets with seriously underpowered specs on buggy software that was never meant to run on a non-phone is hurting the brand.
Expecting the "market" to work itself out is having a little too much faith in markets and consumers imho. Brand damage is real and is helping sink Android into the tech ghetto.