Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Andy Rubin, on Monday posted his thoughts on recent news that Google was clamping down on its partners that want to change Android.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Last week reports surfaced that Google now required a partners changes to Android to be approved by Rubin. The change affected many big names like Facebook and Verizon, but more importantly seemed to go against Google’s openness.

In response, Rubin says that device makers are free to modify Android, but then adds a caveat.

“If someone wishes to market a device as Android-compatible or include Google applications on the device, we do require the device to conform with some basic compatibility requirements,” wrote Rubin.

Also last week, Google delayed the release of its tablet operating system, Honeycomb. Google admitted it took shortcuts to keep up with Apple’s iOS, but that didn’t work out so well for them.

“We continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready,” wrote Rubin. “As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.”