Or Google is telling the truth, and Honeycomb is a temporary aberration that will be fixed upon the release of the next version in a few months. Why it is so hard to believe that Honeycomb is an OS that is not ready for public use (meaning in this case, put on phones and other such devices by manufacturers wanting to have the highest and latest version number Android when Honeycomb isn't designed for such use)? It isn't ideal and I wish they would just release the source and let the chips fall where they may, but there is no indication that Gingerbread is the last public release or the model is the second-latest is publicly available.
To me, the minimal definition of "open source" is that "if it's good enough to sell binaries to end users, it should be good enough to release source to developers", so by that definition, Honeycomb is not open source (although I have no reason to believe that it violates any open source licenses).
I've always found the argument that a product that is being sold to customers is "not ready for public use" specious.
If the Honeycomb delay is a temporary result of working too fast, why is Google giving internal presentations about how they can profit by restricting access to the source to key OEMs?
They claim that the code "is not ready yet for public use", whatever that means.
Either Gingerbread is the last public release, or Google switched to a model where only the second-latest version is publicly available.