Can Android be made truly free and open source?

This is one of the more interesting Android articles I’ve run across lately, and I think it qualifies as being a truly noble experiment. Alas, the last paragraph of the article seems to indicate that a truly FOSS version of Android is a pretty tough thing to achieve. I think it underscores the dangers of having a large company like Google being the force behind Android. If you don’t really care about FOSS then Google owning Android isn’t a problem at all. But if you want your mobile operating system to be FOSS-only then it becomes a real challenge to chop off all of Google’s tentacles.