This certainly goes a long way to improving the Android platform's promise of openness. Had they not released the source for ICS, I'd imagine folks would be crying blue murder.

Have they been releasing the source for the other versions? That's pretty good if they have been doing that.

They have. The only version that didn't get a release was Honeycomb.

Ok not too surprised by that. Honeycomb would have been used to iron out the OS for a tablet platform. But if it's getting released with ICS, then that's great.

Well according to +Abdulla Kamar it includes the full history which includes Honeycomb.

Well, arguably it was three releases (3.0, 3.1 and 3.2) all which were codenamed Honeycomb.

But yes, we get all the code changes, though they're deliberately not tagging the Honeycomb releases (which is a little bit annoying if you want to know exactly what code is running on the current generation of tablets).

Just in case I sounded a bit sour - I'm actually really excited that ICS source is out (before any devices are on the market). Just please Google, never do that again. It made a real mess and looks very poor for an open platform (even if it was stabilize the codebase and prevent anyone depending upon features that would be changed).

Hopefully their future "open" behavior is a little more consistent. The conspiracy theory guy inside me says this was a partial attempt to limit Amazon's ability to fork off Honeycomb for the Fire. I really hope this wasn't the case though.