Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line? [LWN.net]

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

Posted Mar 23, 2011 7:18 UTC (Wed) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048)
Parent article: Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

While this discussion here appears to have subsided for the most part, I wanted to post this quick update. Yesterday I published more evidence of Google's habit of GPL laundering in Android: BlueZ and ext4. The related headers are not part of the /include/ directory path like the headers that C libraries use. Google uniquely deprived those programs of their copyright/copyleft protection.

That blog post also links to a timeline that shows that GPL laundering is part of Google's modus operandi. They started in 2008 and do it all the time. The changelogs indicate this. And I'm sure other companies will now do this, too.

I also did an infographic that shows how Android-related intellectual property litigation has exploded since last year. There are now 37 Android-related intellectual property lawsuits. Those who claim that no one is going to assert IPRs in GPL'd software against Android should consider how litigious this environment undoubtedly is. Also, the huge number of Android-related patent lawsuits is in no small part due to Google's arrogant and reckless approach to other people's intellectual property rights, which takes us full circle back to the GPL laundering issue.

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Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

Posted Mar 23, 2011 14:48 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

These seem to be part of a kernel interface to user-space which, according to Linux licence, is generally held to be a copyright boundary. So your claim there likely is baseless.

There is perhaps a more fundamental problem, in that Google have built their Java userspace bluetooth stack on top of BlueZ. They have insulated their userspace by plugging a DBus proxy/agent in between their software and BlueZ code. However, while this may reduce the technical API dependence of most of their code, the functional fact remains that their Bluetooth stack appears to be dependent on GPL software (outside of that accessed via the Linux userspace API).

My experience of legal advice at another large corporate, in a similarish situation, is that sticking IPC between your code and GPL code does not, of itself, do anything to affect whether or not your code derives from the GPL code.

However, if the BlueZ copyright holders are cool with it, then there's no problem - regardless of what anyone else thinks.

https://sites.google.com/a/android.com/opensource/project...

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

Posted Mar 24, 2011 17:04 UTC (Thu) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

You can't launder something that isn't copyrightable in the first place. As ably explained by the court in Baystate v. Bentley Systems (1996), technical interfaces aren't legitimately protected by copyright.

Google could take the entire internal technical interface to the Linux kernel modulo substantive inline functions, rewrite it in any form by any means whatsoever, distribute it under any "license" they feel like, and probably be entirely in the clear, so far as the law of the United States is concerned.