To my knowledge, the first use of "open" in relation to computing was as "open systems", which largely meant Unix, and VMS to a somewhat lesser extent, as opposed to various mainframe operating systems. The point there was that various Unix systems were intended to be interoperable and interchangeable, through the use of standardized APIs and such, at least to some extent. If you didn't like your vendor, you could move to another without too much heartache, while at the same time Amdahl was suing IBM to be allowed to produce IBM-compatible mainframes (or maybe the other way around). This quickly came to refer to POSIX and related standards.

After Unix became the norm for large-scale computing, "open" came to mean "open source", which meant that you could modify software without input from the vendor.

Now we're talking about "open platforms", which, ignoring the ramblings of a 14 year old, has tended to mean systems that allow modification to some extent. This may mean an OS that allows arbitrary programs to be loaded, a computer that allows modification of its operating system, or a number of other things. I'm perfectly willing to admit that this newer idea is not all that well defined.

However, the one thing that seems to unify all of these things is vendor independence. If I didn't like HP, I could dump them and move to DEC. If I didn't like the way sendmail worked, I could recompile it to do something else. If I didn't like the built-in software on my Nexus One, I could completely reinstall the OS.

I cannot see how any of this can possibly be related to anything that Apple is doing with its iOS. I'm not going to fault them for lack of interoperability. They were pretty much creating a new market where there wasn't really anything to be compatible with. (Well, J2ME, maybe.) However, they are definitely trying their best to tie you in. You are not allowed to modify the base OS on pain of losing your hardware warranty, you are not allowed to install anything that Apple hasn't manually approved, etc.

Unfortunately, some vendors of Android devices have subverted the idea of this type of openness by locking down their hardware. Android itself is still open (I'll ignore the Honeycomb issue for the moment), although it's being installed on hardware platforms that aren't. If Google is going to release the source code for anyone to use, there's not really a great way to prevent vendors from modifying it however they want and doing what they want with it. Yeah, okay, I'll admit that a license could be changed to prevent that sort of abuse, but mobile phone companies aren't likely to put their eggs in that basket, and I imagine that Google knew that going in.

As far as Honeycomb goes, I think that the issue has been overblown. I suspect that they simply don't want to release the source code as it appears right now. I expect that they worked closely with Samsung and maybe some other vendors and might have used some non-open software in order to hit a deadline. Or maybe they're just embarrassed of it right now. We may or may not ever see Honeycomb source code, but I expect we will see open source code that will run on those systems. (Assuming that the hardware vendors haven't closed their systems to prevent that. And if they have, having the source code isn't really going to do anyone any good anyway.)

Now, if you want to use the term "open" to mean "welcoming", you can certainly do that. It's a perfectly legitimate definition. However, it's not what "open" has ever meant in relation to computing. In addition, conflating the two definitions is either misinformed or disingenuous.

Android is certainly in an unfortunate predicament with its openness, on two fronts. There are legitimate arguments against its openness based on the closedness of many of the platforms it runs on, and the lack of release of the source for Honeycomb is troubling (though I personally expect that it will work out). Apple, however, has avoided this by simply not having iOS be open in the first place.