I am a big advocate of open source. But there is also such a thing as "sucker source."
Sucker source is the Little Red Hen story. You do all the work, everyone else then takes it, profits from it, trashes it, and blames you for their mistakes with it.
For open source to work as a development system, it needs contributions from many places, and many people. If it's just one person or one company tossing code out so others can profit from it, giving all and taking nothing, that person is a sucker.
Google isn't going to be a sucker any more. Well, not as much of one.
So it's really no big deal to me, an open source advocate, that Google is holding back its Honeycomb design, for now. Its tablet software will go to tablet makers, serious players only, until it's established enough in the market that customers know what it is, how it should work, and the difference between that and something else.
I was furious with my own Android phone last year, because it wasn't the Google experience its ads led me to expect. Both Samsung and AT&T had thrown a ton of crapware (that didn't work) and adware (that demanded money and couldn't be deleted) on it. I missed my iPhone.
This was possible because the Android name was slapped on phones before it had become clear what an Android phone was, and before consumer expectations had been met.
Google has decided that won't be the case with the tablet version, dubbed Honeycomb. This does not mean that it won't be open source. It means that the person who did the work will control the result of that work until people know what they are getting.
I have no problem with that at all.
Now, if a whole bunch of companies had been working on Honeycomb and Google, as project lead, had unilaterally taken the decision not to share code with the people it was working with, that would be different. In that case, Google would be stealing from its partners.
That's not the case. Google is working with its hardware partners, and when the open source code you need is needed, it will be there. And it will be open source.
