Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum (LinuxFr.org)

Posted Nov 18, 2011 14:54 UTC (Fri) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Also - notice that vendors generally prefer permissive licenses. See Google, for example - the whole Android stack is mostly Apache licensed. Could make sense to replace the copyleft component, if hardware vendors decide it's too much PITA to release their code.

Seems pretty obvious that vendors would wish to privitise their changes. That said, and of course you know, the GPL was designed to combat this tendency. Another angle to consider is that vendors can contribute to a common componant, Linux, and know that their changes will stay open. If you care about selling hardware improving Linux could be a good decision, regardless of whether it helps a competitor.

The value of an operating system that "just works" on your hardware seems to be a pretty big selling point for Linux, especially to vendors that don't ascribe to free software. Sadly, the differentiators for phones, etc, are increasingly in user space. Think Netflix, Hulu, ebooks, etc. Those applications don't care about the licenses underneath.