Welcome To The Age Of Open-ish Technology

From Twitter's API and the Android OS, we live in an age when private companies reap the benefits of some openness while maintaining ultimate control.

Last week, as Tim Cook took the stage to unveil the iPhone 5, I tweeted snarkily that unless he was announcing a reversal of corporate philosophy to support a more open computing environment, I wasn’t interested.

That led, perhaps predictably, to a conversation with a developer friend who’s deeply committed to open-source, about how Google’s Android is hardly a case study in openness. He argued that the difference between Android and iOS was smaller than is commonly appreciated in the media; I argued that the ability to fork Android still matters. For me, the result of that debate was simply the reminder that Android is an open-source project controlled (rather than supported) by a corporation.

Fitting, then, that only days later news dropped about Google objecting to Acer’s partnership with Alibaba, as Google alleges the Chinese company’s new mobile operating system is an Android fork. Whether or not that claim is true, the point is that Open Handset Alliance members like Acer have to play by Google’s rules.