good heavens, not this drivel again please [LWN.net]

good heavens, not this drivel again please

Posted Feb 21, 2012 5:11 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: good heavens, not this drivel again please by felixfix
Parent article: VLC 2.0 released

> I believe that Google would be just as likely to submit fixes to Linux without the GPL as they do now, because they don't want to maintain a sea of patches for the rest of Android's life. Ideology and "do no evil" be damned -- it's easier and in their own best interests.

I can't argue with the rest of your statement but I'm not really sure this is true, maybe they would try but the Android team seems somewhat GPL averse. I think they picked the kernel for its technical superiority and are forced to comply with the license to get it.

That's different than IBM which is willing to put resources into projects because of the GPL. It protects them from competition with proprietary forks of their own labor. They can compete, successfully, on other areas than exclusive access to critical source code

I don't know the android developers though so I may be way off base.

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good heavens, not this drivel again please

Posted Feb 21, 2012 7:08 UTC (Tue) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

The amount of work Google have done to get code back into the kernel mainline shows how little they like having a fork.

My own experience maintaining just a few small patches for a few small packages encourages me to believe it doesn't get any easier with thousands of patches.

Google are just people. Thinking of them as evil personified with greed on top, the kind of people who laugh in the developers' faces about all the extra work they create for them ... well, it's just silly. If nothing else, think about it from the greedy point of view that it's better to get patches back into mainline and lower dev costs and increase product stability.