Closing the knowledge gap': why Google wants Android to be open

A Google team leader explains how making Android's source code open should make cheap smartphones and tablets available for people in the poorest countries

Commuters sit on coaches of a train chasing away vendors hawking their wares on the rail track at Oshodi district of Lagos. What difference could cheap smartphones make here? Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

A minor Twitterstorm blew through on Wednesday when MG Siegler, formerly of TechCrunch, noted that Andy Rubin, the head of Google's Android mobile division, had deleted his famous first tweet about "the meaning of open" (a command line expression explaining how to build Android from the kernel.org repository).
Update: he hadn't deleted it; Twitter had temporarily lost it, but has now restored it, as it told Siegler:

"During maintenance we encountered a bug. It caused us to drop a very small percentage of tweets. One of those was Andy's. As soon as we realized this, we began work to restore them. We were able to recover them quickly and they've now been restored," Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner tells me (from vacation no less).

MG Siegler, noticing its [apparent] absence, wrote a fairly snarky post on its vanishment, which includes the tweet's content.).
Where had it gone? No explanation in Rubin's tweets, which simply ploughed on with his latest about the 3.7m Android devices activated over December 24 and 25 (do you think that might actually be the start of Christmas Day in Australia and New Zealand, when it would still be Christmas Eve in Google's home in California? Even so, that's a lot of devices.). To find out we had to turn to DeWitt Clinton, who is a "technical lead on Google's developer team, focused on building product APIs, growing the developer ecosystem, and defending the open web".
Clinton explains in a post on Google+ that Rubin deleted the tweet because kernel.org was hacked in August, and do the path to the archives had changed.
(As explanations go, it's pretty lame: if you try to follow the path in Rubin's tweet - http://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git - then you get redirected to the location of the current repository, at http://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest.git. Not only that, but if Rubin really thinks people are looking to his tweetstream for advice on how to "make" Android then he's overplaying things, and if he also thinks that it's simpler to delete a famous tweet than to add another one explaining the redirect, then he's not quite got the hang of this "communication" thing. Which would be ironic, really.)
Update: with the restored tweet, you can confirm this for yourself. So that's Rubin exonerated.
But what was more striking was the comment by Clinton about what he believes to be the benefits of Android - not for what it can bring to Google (because remember, anyone can fork Android - as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and a number of Chinese manufacturers have - so that it doesn't use Google services such as Maps or location-based services or ads) but for what it can bring to the wider, unconnected world.
Here's what he wrote:

I believe what Android is accomplishing is truly revolutionary. Mobile is the way that billions of people will one day access the Internet. And through that access, we will soon start to narrow the massive knowledge gap that currently divides the richest from the poorest populations. That there's now an eminently capable open source mobile operating system, one that is free to use and free to fork, means that the knowledge advantage can be better and more evenly distributed across the planet than ever before.

For some pundits, it's all about which companies are building the fanciest and most feature-rich handheld computers. Which, if we're being honest about it, are devices for those that already have everything. When you're at the top, it's great to see the tech giants going head-to-head and competing for our dollars like this. Having a few dollars, I benefit from that, too.

And yet in spite of that, I'm even more excited about seeing a $25 mobile device that has access to a killer web browser and endless mobile apps, and watching that device appear in the hands of a billion school children over the next 10 years.

We can debate endlessly about which device manufacture added what clever UI to which OS, or what carriers allowed (or banned) which hot little app, or which app store has the more sustainable revenue sharing model for up-and-coming Bay Area startups. But yet, no one is going to remember any of those trivial details in the long run.

Historians are, however, going to make note of how the open source Android platform (or its later forks and clones) played a role in facilitating everything from low-cost solar-powered devices in the remotest villages in India and Africa, to a hundred million tablets computers in the classroom each revolutionizing education for children all across Asia and the Middle East, to putting an internet-connected smartphone in the hands of every man, woman, and child in America, even those from the perpetually overlooked majority that simply can't afford a shiny brand-new iPhone or Galaxy Nexus every Christmas.

So ultimately I don't give two hoots about which vendor or which carrier gets to ship which device on which network with which apps. But I'm stunned, stunned, by the audacity of releasing the Android platform as free and open source software. Not just because how it has already shaken things up at the top. But how it will go on to shake the rest of the planet upside down.

You can quibble about minor details (what's the business model exactly? How affordable is $25 in some countries?) but that's a pretty clear expression - closing the knowledge gap - of why broader ownership of smartphones (and perhaps tablets) is a good thing.

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