Alibaba: Google just plain wrong about our OS

Chinese search giant Alibaba is disputing Google's claim that Alibaba's new Aliyun operating system is a forked and incompatible version of Android and thus can't be used by phone maker Acer.
In a blog post yesterday, Google's Andy Rubin said "the Aliyun OS incorporates the Android runtime and was apparently derived from Android."
CNET asked Alibaba's John Spelich about Rubin's/Google's claims and about whether there are elements of Android in Aliyun, and here's what we got in response: "They have no idea and are just speculating. Aliyun is different."

Google took some heat earlier this week for seemingly using its clout to squash a burgeoning mobile OS. Alibaba, an e-commerce company, is known as the Google of China, and wanted to follow Google's playbook and build its own OS. Acer was set to include the OS in a handset, but those plans were apparently scuttled by Google, which said that while Alibaba built its own OS, it lifted elements of Android.
But Spelich told CNET in an e-mail that Aliyun is "not a fork. Ours is built on open-source Linux." And he added that Aliyun "has our own applications. [It's] designed to run cloud apps designed in our own ecosystem. [It] can run some but not all Android apps."
He said Aliyun incorporates its own virtual machine, which is different from Android's Dalvik virtual machine.
"Aliyun's runtime environment, which is the core of the OS, consists of both its own Java virtual machine, which is different from Android's Dalvik virtual machine, and its own cloud app engine, which supports HTML5 web applications," he said. "Aliyun OS uses some of the Android application framework and tools (open source) merely as a patch to allow Aliyun O-S users to enjoy third-party apps in addition to the cloud-based Aliyun apps in our ecosystem."
He also accused the Android ecosystem of being closed and restrictive: