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I like the androidium idea. It would help with the confusion.

The acer problem is an interesting thing to examine closer. The issue is that of android fragmentation. Vendors want to ship hardware asap (to their own detriment at times). Google is more interested in the long term viability of the OS. I think the acer threat is a good thing. It's good that Google maintains this leverage. Otherwise, android will fragment and die. Vendors were pushing hard to get a tablet OS out before it was ready. Google capitulated and offered up honeycomb, but soon learned that wasn't viable. They had to do something to give themselves more time to present a unified strategy.

I disagree that CM would die without pirated roms. I do agree however, that this has a lot to do with it's popularity. Keep in mind that the play store, maps, and other services aren't open for a reason. Sometimes it's because the technology uses proprietary bits that Google expects to monetize (maps) and other times it has to do with legal concerns (the play store, which allows in store purchases).

I agree with what you said about Google doing these things for the good of the Android ecosystem, but the problem is with calling Android "open". There are a lot of caveats to that statement which almost always go unmentioned by the person calling it open.

> The problem came to fore when Acer got threatened with being cut off early access etc. when they wanted to launch other phones with Alibaba OS (Aliyun) on them. It's sort of a Android fork, but that's legal, but still Acer had to fold under the pressure or force getting cut off from their mobile business. Early access is much more important to OEMs than you make it seem to be and being able to fork is the core tenet of open source.

At first glance it looked like Google was going mental about Acer and Alibaba forking Android, but later on it became clear that their Aliyun OS was to be released with all the Google Apps preinstalled, which of course is not allowed. Hence all the drama at Google. Combine that with the fact that Alibaba is a big company in Asia, which gives Google reasons enough to step up.

> You know what, barely anyone would use CM if they couldn't get access to the Play Store and Google Apps like Map. So they download it illegally from other sources. CM used to provide them but got a warning from Google. So right now they wink-wink-nudge-nudge towards the Play Store.

Same issue here. Not allowed to come with Google Apps preinstalled. But unlike Aliyun, CM is not a competitor in the smartphone OS market. It just provides an alternative to the standard installed Android OS with custom manufacturer skin (Sense, TW, ...) and often bloated apps. Although Google forbids CM to come prepackaged with Gapps, I highly doubt Google would ever go on a crusade against CM for providing links to the Gapps packages floating freely on the net. After all, with a few exceptions, only people owning a genuine Android phone would ever flash CM. Having the ability to still flash Gapps would continue to extend their value as a customer to Google due to ad and Play Store revenue.

It's just Google enforcing their policy concerning the Play Store and Google Apps in the entire Open Source story that is Android. It's actually Google that's wink-wink-nudge-nudge-ing the entire custom rom developer scene. Plenty of ways for Google to DRM their apps to prevent the likes of CM from using them, but they won't.

Cyanogen Mods

Excuse me?

They are possible because Android is open source.

Edit: overlooked that you already mentioned them. The argument "nobody uses them without Play and Maps" is invalid, though.

>The argument "nobody uses them without Play and Maps" is invalid, though.

Why? CM is legally prohibited from bundling Play Store, Google apps like Mail, Youtube, Maps, Currents, Now etc. etc.

In fact, Google sent them a C&D for doing so.

http://phandroid.com/2009/09/25/cyanogen-gets-cd-from-google...

If users cannot obtain them from (sometimes shady) filesharing sites, how many using CM currently would have installed it?

Still, the OS is open source, even if some of the apps are not. Number of installs is not a relevant metric for open sourceness.

The OP I was replying to said that projects like CM won't be popular if Android wasn't open source.

I replied that CM's popularity is a direct result of people committing copyright infringement by providing and downloading non-open source Google apps. Won't cutting that off reduce the popularity of CM?

AOSP is open. Android? Probably not so much, since it includes the Play Store and Google Apps in common usage of the term. Don't you see the technical distinction between Android and AOSP?

I'm not so sure that cutting off access to play has as much to do with the popularity as much as vendors "abandoning" their devices.

The only way I can run a "modern" version of Android on my Viewsonic Gtablet is by using CM, and I don't care that I don't have access to google play on it. The Amazon marketplace is free to download and install and the apps work great.

What's the difference between "Androidium" and AOSP?

It's cooler, and kinda rhymes with Chromium (which is to Chrome what Androidium will be to Android).

There's probably no difference technically, but you don't see people using that term much. For example, in this thread we see people saying Android is open, instead of AOSP is open.

Perhaps increasing the usage of the AOSP term will suffice.