Is Android really open source or not? That is the question being asked by almost everyone. A lot of people, especially those influenced by RDF or those who are in the news industry with no idea about OS and open source but were asked by their boss to get a scoop on this pronto, tend to bring up a few keywords and then twist them around in the way they see fit to make sure it says Android isn’t open. They don’t need to be correct, they only need the article to “sound correct” by picking up sentences out of context or putting quotes only from people who agree with them. This will convince their boss and 99% of their readers who have no idea about all these things either. But the boss is happy he got a story and associated clicks. Readers are happy because they got the points to float around in their next forum flame war. They don’t have to read when someone corrects them. They have made their points and rest is all someone making noises like a rat.

If you have come across a tutorial or just someone on a forum who tells you to install something in Debian/Ubuntu that involves using apt-get, it is ok for you but when they tell you that you need to use a caret symbol (^) at the end, that’s where you become curious. What is even more weird is that when you search for the name of the package that the given command seems to install cannot be found using apt-cache search. e.g. You will see this used most often when someone tells you how to install LAMP server setup (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) by using the command “sudo apt-get install lamp-server^”. If you miss the caret at the end or try to search for lamp-server, it just doesn’t work.

Yes! As of today noon, paid apps are now visible on my Android Nexus One in India. Few salient points (Also, look at the end to see how to get paid apps if you are not able to see them yet):

• The marketplace shows approximate prices of each app in Indian Rupees (INR) (Edit: I’ve just learned from few tweets that this is a new feature worldwide. People everywhere are now seeing approximate app costs in their local currencies. Good stuff!)

Seems like there is a major problem going on with WordPress.com and it’s stats plugin right now. On logging into your WordPress blog, instead of seeing the pretty charts and stats, you will see a login box instead. On logging in, it just redirects back to the same thing again (Dashboard with login page). And if you try logging into your profile over at WordPress.com, then it just redirects back to your main blog associated with your WordPress.com profile even if it is a self hosted blog.

We heard the news today that paid apps in Android market place have been extended to 18 new countries. Could “Carrier Billing” (Allowing your service operator to add the apps’ price to your cellphone bill) be the reason behind it? I think so. It was long suggested that Google Checkout and corresponding legal issues in using it across various countries was the reason behind the paid apps not being available in those countries. The, all of us developers got an email from Google on 24th of July about an updated Developers’ Distribution Agreement, which basically said in clause 13.1 that “authorized carriers” had been added as an indemnified party in the apps sales.