291–300 of 350 posts
For Pixel drivers, is there something that prevents Google from relicensing them to proprietary and not share any source at all?
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As far as I understand, they could send it to you printed and bound and charge you for the paper and postage if they want to.
I have trouble imagining that Google could seriously argue that printing tens of millions of lines of code would be customary. I doubt Google is distributing the Android code to third party OEMs that way.
Judge would be like 'Mr Counsel, where does it say that what Google did violated the law'
The era of big tech cooperation around free software is obviously over. Those kind of moves are petty but there are worst tricks they can pull unfortunately. It seems Grapheneos is the rare actor willing to put up a fight nowadays, and their "partnership" with Motorola seems to be a first step. They need to ensure a hardware platform. My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP, just because Google will tak…
> My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP I am still sad that Huawei didn't go this way, I thought they would with HarmonyOS. I wonder if it could happen at some point that an alternative Android becomes so big that OEMs start supporting it. It feels like it may be interesting for the big Android manufacturers to support something like GrapheneOS? I wonder: for those Motorola phones that will come with…
There's been no confirmation that any phones will come pre-installed with GrapheneOS from Motorola, just that some phones will be compatible.
My guess is Google is already applying pressure on Motorola to make sure every phone still ships with standard Android from the factory.
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But Linux allowed Tivoization though.
There are worse things than Tivoization. Google helped lobby the FSF to adopt GPLv3, which bans tivoization, but allows software as a service. This is why you cannot have bash on MacOS, but Google can still use it to build surveillance capitalism, and arbitrarily enshittify your word processor.
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Fairphones are easy to unlock, repairable, have a long lifetime and offer a variety of different operating system distributions.
Fairphone with its 8-year updates, swappable battery, and decent repairability is great for those of us who doesn't like to be forced to change phones often. I'm not sure, however, what variety of distributions you mean. It supports 1 Android, and 1 de-googled Android. Which isn't bad at all, but still doesn't sound like "variety".
There are also various reports of things like running e.g. Fedora on an FP6, https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fairphone-6-turns-into-a-Linux... or Debian on FP4/5, but those generally aren't something that is usable due to lacking support for basic things like calls.
What's the point of Android if not of being open?!! I don't see any value for them to be closed or combative. It's sad to see Google, once the greatest company on earth, lose absolutely everything of what they made them great in just a matter of a couple of years.
“In violation of GPL” is a stretch. Can’t imagine Google is making the process of obtaining source code easier on themselves though. Android has always been more source-open than “open source”. The vast majority of community contributions that make it into the codebase are security fixes and small bug fixes. Everything else is essentially all the work of Google and (to some extent) Samsung.
I see your point, However the majority of Android devices have lots of closed source firmware/drivers, a large part of the Android OS doesn't run without them. I'm refering to Bootloaders, TrustZone OS, Trusted Applications, then firmware for Bluetooth, Wifi, GPU, Sensors and power management. All of those are always closed source binary blobs running in the background.