Google has failed, was: has gotten itself (and us) into a pickle

It is the sort of problem I've become familiar with lately. For solid business reasons, big G has left a small shiny frosting of commercial software on top of their otherwise open (source) system. This has, as always, caused a big mess for both the developing company Google, outside developers, and users. In this case we are talking about the Google developed mobile (phone) platform Android. There's been a lawyer letter sent to an outside developer and a great deal of noisy poorly conceived commentary already, so bear with me while I explain.

ETA: It's over and Google has fucked it. Details from Cyanogen are on his Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/cyanogen or Google's mealy-mouthed blog post: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/09/note-on-google-apps-for-android.html. Also worth noting: the new Market application that seems to have provoked this stupidity is pretty nice, much better than the previous one. xda-developers are furious that CM was singled out.

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Your comments are appreciated. In particular this piece is too long but I am unsure that it can be accurate and be much shorter. Thanks for reading!