Andy Rubin took issue with Steve Jobs’ analysis of the openness of Google at Apple’s earnings release, and tweeted his opinion on the matter. Unfortunately, the tweet was either massively ironic, or completely misses the point of what Jobs was attempting to say. The tweet Rubin sent was a terminal command intended to demonstrate the full extent to which Android is open: the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make” However, what Rubin ultimately demonstrates is that Google simply has a different…

If you hate Facebook, mark the date September 15th in your calendar. The guys from Diaspora, the anti-Facebook, have announced that their product is ready to ship and will be open sourced in mid-September. The software began life as a Kickstarter project looking for $10,000 and ended up pulling in $200,642, allegedly including a donation by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Various alternatives to Facebook exist, but none provide the same full circle of social connectivity. Diaspora has the lofty goal of capturing what people love about Facebook while completely alleviating the security and…

Imagine a city with stores that look like jail cells, dark alleys with no end in sight, graffiti written all over the walls, and thugs on every street corner. This city is the open web, containing Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, eBay, Paypal, and others. Now imagine a city with multi-million dollar mansions, paved streets with clean sidewalks, beautiful parks with freshly-cut grass, and happy people enjoying every second of life. This is Apple’s ecosystem, led by the iPhone, iPad, and iTunes. That’s a pretty drastic comparison, wouldn’t you say? Well, this is how Virginia Heffernan of The New York…