| |||||||||||||
GPL and AndroidGPL and AndroidPosted Aug 22, 2011 15:12 UTC (Mon) by southey (subscriber, #9466)In reply to: Android OEMs should hear Microsoft, Nokia out on Google-Motorola combo (ars technica) by xxiao Parent article: Android OEMs should hear Microsoft, Nokia out on Google-Motorola combo (ars technica)
Your argument doesn't work because the GPL in the Linux kernel forces Google to freely give the vast majority of Android code to everyone. It is hard to consider that any 'non-free' Android components would force customer's to use Google Android unless the economics make sense.
The only thing that Google could do is hold back releases but, as Linux and open source history has shown, that requires major effort (see the need for maintainers of old trees and the amount of effort that companies like Red Hat to support the kernel acros distros). Thus, this is unlikely as it is self-defeating with the major risk that other's will fork Android and move ahead of you.
(Log in to post comments)
GPL and Android Posted Aug 22, 2011 16:14 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] Your argument doesn't work because the GPL in the Linux kernel forces Google to freely give the vast majority of Android code to everyone.No, it forces Google to give the kernel source to everyone. Almost all of the rest is under Apache or similar, so Google can close it up at will (as they did with Honeycomb).
GPL and Android Posted Aug 23, 2011 13:28 UTC (Tue) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link]
Nope as only the kernel is the important part since it has to interact with the hardware. Consequently, any non-free software part is irrelevant provided you are prepared to write the code. Perhaps this will force the manufacturers to be more a community than waiting for the 'grass to grow'.
GPL and Android Posted Aug 28, 2011 23:47 UTC (Sun) by kolla (guest, #23560) [Link]
There's plenty of non-GPL binary blobs in the android kernel modules. My LG-P990 Optimus 2x has nVidia chipset in it, do you think that the driver (kernel module) is written by Google or LG? No, it's written by nVidia, and is as closed source as they get.
|
|||||||||||||