The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 4, 2017 10:44 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769)
In reply to: The rise of copyright trolls by faramir
Parent article: The rise of copyright trolls

> throwing a "free" SD card of source code in the box with every phone

That sounds incredibly expensive.

> make the source archive part of the initial disk image on the phone with a simple way for the user to delete it

I think that'd be awkward to implement, given Android's usual partition design. There are read-only system partitions (whose contents are cryptographically signed by the OEM and verified at boot) and writable user data partitions. OTA updates replace the system partitions and leave the user data unchanged. Factory resets wipe the user data partitions and leave the system partitions unchanged. Before the user gets to use their new phone, it probably goes through both a factory reset (at the factory, to clean up after testing) and an OTA update (once the user first connects to the internet, since the version flashed at the factory is old). There isn't a suitable place to store the source archive.

Also typical users would get very confused if asked whether they wanted to delete the GPL source for their phone's Linux kernel, because they have no idea what any of that means, so it's a poor user experience.

If you wanted to store a non-deleteable source archive instead: It looks like the source provided for a Samsung Galaxy S8 is 185MB, and they might sell around 50 million of them, and flash storage apparently costs something on the order of $0.40/GB, so that'd essentially add up to about $4M. That sounds a lot more expensive than hiring a few lawyers and engineers to find a better solution that doesn't add many cents of cost to every single device.

(And that's just for phones; the problem is harder for IoT devices that may be sold in much larger quantities for much lower prices, with much less storage space, with no ability to transfer files to a PC, etc, and may still be running Linux or even Android.)

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 5, 2017 16:01 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

> If you wanted to store a non-deleteable source archive instead: It looks like the source provided for a Samsung Galaxy S8 is 185MB, and they might sell around 50 million of them, and flash storage apparently costs something on the order of $0.40/GB, so that'd essentially add up to about $4M. That sounds a lot more expensive than hiring a few lawyers and engineers to find a better solution that doesn't add many cents of cost to every single device.

$4M is substantially less expensive than developing a mobile OS on your own, I'm sure they have received many orders of magnitude more value from the Linux kernel and related open source technology than the costs of license compliance.

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 5, 2017 16:25 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Quite ironically $4M is probably orders of magnitude less than what Samsung pays for Microsoft's patent licenses.

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 5, 2017 17:35 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

By "a better solution" I didn't mean replacing Linux, I meant things like (as a poor example) adding a URL with the source code onto the piece of paper that already has the warranty information, or offering free legal support to resellers of their phones, or whatever they decide is an effective way to comply with the license and avoid copyright trolls. There's surely a solution that scales better than one that increases the manufacturing cost of each device, which is important when working at the tens-of-millions-of-devices scale.

$4M is negligible compared to the total cost of the product, or compared to the value provided by Linux, but that doesn't mean it's not worth saving if you can. $4M here, $4M there, pretty soon you're talking real money.