But since you can't see the current state of development, you can't know whether your fix is even relevant anymore. That's a big reason why I prefer to use and contribute to CyanogenMod, and if Google ever wants to cherry-pick my patches (minor though they are), they're welcome to it.
No the openness argument is that the code is open and it is. It is 100% open source, Apache and GPL. What this does is limit their openness. You can't see every line as it's written.
I would guess they do it this way because they work with a lot of unreleased hardware, and the carriers and manufacturers don't want any leaks.
Lots of programmers prefer to tinker in private and only submit to repositories after everything is cleaned up and debugged. Others are fine with exposing every keystroke. In both cases we should be grateful if the end result contributed to the public good as Free Software.
Wait, I'm not sure I understand: "the openness argument is that the code is open and it is" and "this does is limit their openness" -- what do you mean by that?
Anyway, my point is that you would not call Firefox an open source project if it was developed internally by Mozilla and just released code every major release. It's not that I don't think it's good that that they release the code, it's that they use "open" as an argument when it's only open when it benefits them -- and not a second before.
Related question, if someone knows: Does the Android team take patches from those outside Google? (I know that Chrome does.)