Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

> Sure source availibility isn't everything, and isn't the same thing as community (the point Andy Rubin makes) but, when the source is available with no community it is still possible for a community to form later (by forking if needed). To some extent this happened, albeit temporarilly, with Android with early "community" Android forks like Cyanogen actually bringing significant new features that ended up becoming available in official Android only later (stuff like tethering and permissions modifications come to mind).

Interestingly this happened with iPhones too! Despite most of their software not being open source. All those quick control popouts and a lot of the additional interaction options for stuff like notifications were added by third party mods for "jailbroken" iphones long before apple implemented them. I'm not sure if this is Android/Apple taking ideas from the "community" or just obviously good ideas being implemented by the community first, because a hobbyist doesn't need to polish things up that much before shipping (or go through endless UI redesigns, UX research, etc, etc).