It is just not feasible to significantly hold up development (and thus the
shipment of devices that manufacturers have schedules to deliver and
carriers have in their roadmaps to provide to their customers) for "building
a good ecosystem."

As I've said before: this is an on-going process.  I hope that people can
see things improving over time.  It's not going to happen all at once, but
it is certainly happening.

There is nothing preventing people from contributing, though sure it is not
as easy now as would be ideal.  We are in the process of integrating CDMA
that was contributed, and are starting to take in other features.  This also
takes a lot of time from current developers (such as myself), since for
people starting to contribute there is a lot of hand-holding required to get
code into acceptable shape so that it accounts for all of the things we need
to deal with: well optimized to run efficiently, small size so it will fit
on the devices, consistent with the existing code styles, maintainable for
binary compatibility in the case of anything that appears in the SDK, etc.
This also is just something that I expect to happen over time, as people
learn to work on Android.

To be honest, I care mostly about the people who are actually contributing
stuff, much less the people who seem to just complain about how it isn't yet
as open as they would like.  (And that is why I try to avoid spending my own
time posting on these threads.)

--
Dianne Hackborn
Android framework engineer
hack...@android.com

Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to
provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails.  All such
questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and
answer them.