Google really doesn’t want Honeycomb on phones

I'm also inclined to think that this is a pragmatic move by Google.<p>Sometimes you have to "close" the source for a period of time to satisfy commercial restrictions and all is well when it is opened again.

No, they don't. They want Ice Cream (the 3.1 version that combines the tablet and phone "forks" of Android) on it. They don't want people trying to hack Honeycomb onto a phone when they know it's going to turn out horribly.

FTA, quoting Andy Rubin: “To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs. We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut. We have no idea if it will even work on phones.”<p>I'm no Apple Fanboi (I'm a Linux fanboi, if anything), but this shows what a phenomenal job Apple has done with iOS.

If they are truly only closing it temporarily for usability and user experience reasons (e.g. 3.0 won't work well on most phones right now), then I have no problem with it.

Cheap crappy manufacturers are rushing to get the latest version on their phones even if it doesn't work well, while big-name manufacturers use horribly outdated versions that don't work as well as the current one? It seems like only Google cares about actually delivering a good experience to the user.<p>Can someone with insight in to the industry explain this?

Until Android is open-source in the public development sense there will always be hope and hype for a properly-free open alternative.<p>What the world really needs is for some small competitor to Google in some space to make a very public attempt to get some tech into the tree. For example, for one of the smallest mapping companies to try and make an API for in-app mapping-services.<p>Then Google will wake up.

I'm surprised to find out that none of the reused components are GPL besides the kernel. Is the whole tree otherwise licenses like Apache that don't require releasing the sources?