Impossible? No. Very difficult to get both people management and engineering skills in the same person? Yup. That's true, but that's why you take care of that person when you find them.
Correction, I should have said that Amazon, et al build ANDROID devices, not AOSP. My bad.
But you don't need to sign this agreement if you don't include Google apps on any of your devices. That's the point. Amazon, Ubuntu, Firefox all build AOSP devices without Google apps. It can be done. Of course, the hard part is making your own services and apps layer on them that makes it something people would want to use.
What Acer violated was the Open Handset Alliance agreement, something different than the agreement discussed here. Again, you don't have to belong to the Open Handset Alliance to fork Android. Acer did, so they got called on violating it. But you do not need to sign onto it to produce Android devices.
No, Google has no problem with anyone forking Android. What they don't want is people taking the Google Play Store, Google apps, but supplanting them with others, like Samsung has done.
Android itself was built to be forked. It literally is a platform to build other platforms.
The Google apps and Play Store are a different thing entirely.
Right. And he pointed out that there's nothing that says you have to license those apps. You can build a perfectly good, workable Android phone that has zero Google apps on them. This agreement has nothing that stops you from doing that.
"Little else matters than to write good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer