In a new blog post by Andy Rubin, Google VP of Engineering, Andy defends Android’s open-source credentials, commenting that:

• “As always, device makers are free to modify Android to customize any range of features for Android devices”
• “Finally, we continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready”
• “As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code”

When Andy talks about this, he reconfirms that Google will continue to publish the Android source code under an open-source licence, but he also seems to confirm that Google don’t really believe in the open source development model for Android.

By withholding the “unfinished” code (is code ever finished?) from both the public and device manufacturers like HTC, who have said they will only be able to start work on Android 3.0 once it’s released, Google are limiting the outside input into Android.

This model of “closed open source” is heavily discussed in the “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“, published by ESR in 1996, that defined much of open source development of the period, and has continued to guide people on developing open source projects. It discusses the success of open source projects such as Linux which accepted code contributions from anyone, and the failure of other open source projects where the maintainer considers only their own code to be “good enough” for release, and instead chooses to work alone, only letting people work on the new code when the developer feels ready.

If you read the paper, I think you can only come to the conclusion that Google believe in the “cathedral” development model, occassional (perhaps rare) releases that noone outside the cathedral can contribute to.

Rather than encourage unity in the Android code base, this is more likely to decrease unity, and introduce new forks, as each manufacturer has to work separately to introduce new features, which they wait for the cathedral to perform the new ceremony.

What does this mean for Android in the long-term? I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure that HTC, Samsung, and the other device manufacturers are well down the road of their own internal forks of Android 2.3, just in case Android 3.0 never quite makes it out of Google’s currently closed door…