Open sourcing MIUI would go a long way in restoring trust from a product that does come from one of the most totalitarian countries in the world with a government that tends to get its nose involved in any significant or interesting tech project.
It has been been brought up time and time again, elsewhere, that since MIUI is a Chinese tech-related project that politics is unfortunately tied in or will get tied in eventually because companies are setup differently there. In fact MIUI China also offers cloud backup and application hosting which isn't exactly cheap with no guarantees of privacy on their servers. Worse, the MIUI Dev team seems to either have a sizeable team that are working on it privately, with incredible releases weekly for an entire year, all pro-bono for a closed source system.
You can imagine why, even though I'm a huge MIUI fanboy, that it is difficult to convince others in the tech community to give it a try. Many professionals or privacy enthusiasts thus wont give MIUI a chance out of security concerns or fears that there could be a backdoor given previous scandals in China.
In the end, open sourcing MIUI fully would definitely go a long way in restoring trust and actually bringing this amazing achievement out, improving what people might think of China's image as well as showing that Chinese devs are capable of going through a beautiful, creative, and amazing tech project without being marred by controversy like so many other projects have.
Danny - I haven't seen the announcement that MIUI was going open source. Could you please link?
Dkasak - Google Android has certain applications of it's own that aren't open source such as the Google Market, along with drivers that haven't been open sourced is an issue on the part of the phone manufacturer (lookin' at you Samsung!) and not Google. The vast majority of Android OS is open source and one could easily port a copy over to their own device. However, I think you may be referring to Matt Porter's 'Mythbuster's Android' presentation at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe that as embedded devices go, Android is not really a true traditional Linux implementation and is missing a lot that Linux devs take for granted. Android definitely needs a lot of work in that area before it can really be accepted by the vast majority of Linux developers.