Merc discovers open vaporware alliance

This weekend, our local paper noticed that Google’s announcement of a Linux mobile platform is thus far a vaporware alliance:

[T]he software promised by Google's Open Handset Alliance was supposed to give programmers everything they needed to design a sophisticated cell phone and add their own applications.

But Google has yet to deliver.

"What have they been doing for three years?" said Sean Byrnes, chief executive of Flurry, a San Francisco start-up that offers free e-mail software that makes regular mobile phones more like smart-phones.

The sidebar is even more brutal

Android by the numbers
Days since Android was announced: 75
Number of developers who have joined the Android developer forum: 7,172
Versions of Android wallpaper that Google has released: 6
Lines of source code Google has released: 0

It’s hard for big firms to let go of open source communities, as the LiMo partnership demonstrated a year ago.