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?