Yesterday, Joe Hewitt—a developer of much renown, he worked on Firefox and developed the plug-in Firebug, and currently works with the Facebook team—had an opinion about the industry response to Steve Jobs’s rant Monday. The CEO of Apple had made a point of criticizing Google Android for being too “open” and explained to the community how being more proprietary (like Apple’s iPhone) The rant called down a firestorm of commentary and tweets from Android supporters.

Here’s a roll up of the relevant tweets that frame his argument (you can see his entire Twitter stream for more),

How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?

Compare the Android “open source” model to Firefox or Linux if you want to see how disingenuous that “open” claim is.

Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.

I think it is the lack of visibility into daily progress that bothers me about Android more than the lack of write access.

Refusing to share your vision and progress until the big event… how very open.

@mclazarus true open source projects have a process for earning checkin privileges.

Point I am trying to make is, Rubin bickering with Jobs is a farce, because both refuse to share the one thing that matters: control.

@risaacs99 I am saying they are doing the bare minimum, but boasting as if they are on the level of Linux or Firefox, or even Chrome OS.

@risaacs99 like Rubin bragging about how downloading a months old code dump is the definition of open.

Today, Hewitt has gone ahead and written an article for the San Francisco Chronicle in an attempt to clarify his position. In it, he argues nobly for a back-to-basics withdrawal from using the word “open” to mean anything less than expedient access to developers and total transparency from day zero. He does so by comparing the Google Android project to several open-source browser projects, like Firefox, which he worked on.

The problem that Hewitt ran into headlong, though, is that the context of “openness” here happened to be Google Android vs. Apple iPhone and not Google vs. the open-source community. He does go on to clarify his position in this article, and does a good job of explaining why what he said isn’t as relevant as it sounds, but it bears to mention that he was essentially comparing apples and oranges: mobile phone OS platforms and PC browsers may both be fruit, but they grow on notably different trees. It’s hard to say that Google is actually boasting that Android enjoys the same openness as Firefox and other open-source projects; but they’re certainly not going to pretend that they don’t enjoy the notoriety of being more open than iPhone.

When the cards are on the table Google Android falls so much closer to the open-source community in openness than the iPhone does—than any other mobile platform development suite, in fact—that it’s safe to say that Google has the most open architecture currently popularly available.

His complaints do hinge well around the fact that the word “open” has become a marketing buzzword when used by technology advocates in the field and that this is bad. Truthfully, the state of “openness” of technology in this context doesn’t mean anything to consumers—it does mean something to developers, of course—but the average customer is not hearing the same thing as the average developer when a row breaks out.

He concludes that while he’s not happy about the dilution of the term “open” in the market, he is aware of why Android works the way it does:

It’s clear to me that the only reason Android has enjoyed so much success is that Google has given the carriers pretty much everything they could ask for, and the carriers have responded with the ton of marketing dollars and subsidies that Google needed in order for Android to have any shot to compete with the iPhone. While I can criticize Google for compromising Android in an effort to please the carriers, I have to admit that if they hadn’t done this, Android would very likely be irrelevant today.

And he walks away from the subject with a little bit of wisdom: that he hopes one day it will become practical for Google Android to embrace the development paradigm they so boldly ape.