Yaghmour: Extending Android's HAL

The Android ecosystem is an inclusive one, including being inclusive of OEMs wanting to bolt in various proprietary "value add" bits in userspace if they want. We strongly encourage GPL2 kernel drivers, and we've never shipped a lead device that uses binary blobs in the kernel.

We also minimize the use of userspace proprietary goop as much as possible -- the more recent Nexus devices tend to have the opengl libraries be closed (but the kernel side of GPU support as GPLv2), and firmware that is needed for wifi/bt, and sometimes a handful of other things, but the vast majority of SoC, platform, and peripheral support as plain 'ol GPLv2 Linux kernel drivers.

It's rare that anything in a HAL library is something you'd *want* in the kernel -- usually it's policy stuff (audio routing, modem control, etc) or image processing or whatnot, not stuff that would likely be accepted as Linux kernel drivers even if it was open source. I certainly agree that having as much stuff as possible fully open is the place we want to go, but I am not seeing the HAL mechanism being used as some kind of "backdoor" to avoid writing GPL'd kernel drivers.