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Ask what the best part of Android is and without a doubt you will eventually get the answer "that it's open". Partly true, but only as long as you are on Google's good side, which Acer recently found themselves not being.

Since Google likes to keep changing the very definition of "open" in relation to Android, perhaps it would be best for us to look to a completely different system? One that truly and really is, open?

While Android has indeed been a great kindler of fires in the world of open source for mobile, Google has very much been keeping the reins in a way that makes Android anything but open. There are still very large chunks of Android source code that are not available for the world to see, and chances are we never will. At least until Google feels like giving it to us.

But there is soon an aesthetically pleasing and battle-tested alternative to Android, which is promising to be even more open than Android has so far been; Open webOS!

Bizarrely enough, the cataclysmic blundering of HP's previous CEO, Léo Apotheker, might lead to one of the most open mobile operating systems available. While we will soon also have Mozilla's Boot to Gecko, Open webOS has the advantage of being tested in the field as well as based on Webkit.

Will all the people loudly screaming that the greatest feature of Android it its openness move over to Open webOS, now that the webOS transition to open source is almost complete? I doubt it. Partly in that there is currently no real hardware on which to run it, an advantage Android does indeed have. But what about tomorrow? If we do get the promised new devices running the very open Open webOS, what then?

My gut feeling tells me that the people who yell "open" the loudest are just deluting themselves into believeing that that's what they care the most about. The fact that they can have swallowed Google's marketing hook, line and sinker probably never even occured to them.

Author

Robert Falck

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