Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, we’re maybe jumping the gun here–there’s no little blue and white checkmark next to his name, but TechCrunch seems pretty confident that @arubin is, in fact, Andy Rubin, Google’s VP of Engineering and the head of Android, having “confirmed with a couple of people in the know” that it is indeed him.

The fascinating thing, however, isn’t the fact that Rubin is on Twitter–there are plenty of execs and other prominent folk on the micro-blogging site. Rather, it’s the fact that the former Danger CEO used his first tweet to take a jab at Steve Jobs, who, as mentioned before, crashed an Apple earnings meeting to say some mean things about Google’s Android and all of this talk of software openness.

Rubin’s tweet is as follows,

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make

Our lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan has graciously agreed to translate the above geek speak for the rest of us,

Rubin’s tweet lists the commands needed to start compiling a copy of Android on your home Linux machine. He’s emphasizing that anyone can develop for, hack, and even create their own version of Android. The irony, of course, is that Jobs would probably consider that a negative – Apple likes the uniformity of iOS. Rubin’s declaration of openness also overlooks that some consumers don’t have the freedom to hack their retail devices because of choices made by their wireless carriers and mobile-phone manufacturers.

Rubin hasn’t added anything since that first tweet posted about seven hours ago. We don’t mind. So far he’s battling 1,000.