111–120 of 206 posts
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Morally you might be right. Legally it's a grey area, and practically it's almost certainly a no-go.
So basically company can take your gpld code, extend it, slap their license on the whole thing it and redistiribute binaries without the source code and nobody can slap the gpl back on where it should be because it's a gray area?
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Bad example because officially dude is also male. The female is dudine, dudette, or dudess. But like like guy, dude because gender neutral in common speech.
Just to nitpick, guy and dude are not gender neutral, they just happened to be heavily used by the community in general, mostly because people assume users are men by default.
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Morally you might be right. Legally it's a grey area, and practically it's almost certainly a no-go.
So basically company can take your gpld code, extend it, slap their license on the whole thing it and redistiribute binaries without the source code and nobody can slap the gpl back on where it should be because it's a gray area?
Whether you can directly slap the GPL back on these modifications is very discutable. You can most certainly sue them for breaching the license, though.
(and, like sister comment says, this is not what's happening here anyway)
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Sadly, this is a typical thing that goes on in the Android User development community. Lots of casual attitudes by hobbyists that modify the Linux Kernel and rattle off some sort of excuse for not posting their sources while distributing binary copies. Others end up "relicensing" similar to the guy on github, thinking that because they changed a few lines of code, they can claim to own the license to the software now…
The last point you raise is one of the reasons that I think the drive to bring as many "proverbial grandmothers" to Linux presents a very serious concern. Imagine if Linux distros started getting treated like Android does? Android got those legions of "regular" users and participants that everybody seems to want and it is not a pretty scene because of it.
Part of it definitely has to do with the end users getting too close to those doing the development and the result is chaos. It ends with users totally disrespecting real developers--stirring up unnecessary drama and fanboyism. Then there's users that compiled Android (or worse, added a few apps into a ROM by opening it in 7zip) and are suddenly an Android development expert (and users that believe it by defending them and donating money).
I'm just glad that most other development communities on the web are much more civil (though I'm sure there's outliers). Even with Ubuntu's rise in popularity, it comes nowhere close to matching the appalling behavior I've witnessed with Android. I've seen people belittled by users for simply trying to post an honest bug report to a developer in their forum thread. Though with the way users spam up those threads with offtopic discussion, one is just as likely to have their bug report missed/ignored.
When the code is out there, is it possible that a third-party will modify the existing exFAT projects based on this "leak", and get them to work properly and out of userspace?
It would be very bad if they do, since that would open the existing exFAT projects up to legal action. Anyone who has read the Samsung code is "tainted" with the knowledge of Samsung's proprietary techniques which may be copyrighted, so those people may well introduce copyright violations into the code. In clean-room reverse engineering projects, the people who are examining the system to be reverse engineered are ne…
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Less fly-by-night-ish projects seem to have little trouble finding mirroring that 1) isn't shared by so much warez 2) doesn't make me visit a webpage and make me do a CAPTCHA, 3) doesn't blast me with shady as hell popups and advertising.
The majority of Android ROMs (at least from the likes of XDA) are hosted at one of a few places -- goo.im being (probably) the most prevalent. There is 1) little to no warez (I've never seen any), 2) no CAPTCHA and 3) no pop ups and only text ads on goo.im. Another popular one Dev-host ( http://d-h.st/ ) also features none of the cruft you complain about. CyanogenMOD ( http://get.cm/ ) is hosted through several large…
I'll admit, the situation is improved because nobody tried to sell me a penis pump when I visited the site. No wake me when the solution to every other minor problem is not "Sort through this 500+ page forum thread, and find the guy who posted a 'fix' without sourcecode that comes in the form of a several rar files from Mega, adding up to 2GB. Oh and by the way, he even included a bunch of pirated gameboy roms for you too!"
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It would be very bad if they do, since that would open the existing exFAT projects up to legal action. Anyone who has read the Samsung code is "tainted" with the knowledge of Samsung's proprietary techniques which may be copyrighted, so those people may well introduce copyright violations into the code. In clean-room reverse engineering projects, the people who are examining the system to be reverse engineered are ne…
Not just copyrighted. Microsoft claims a whole bunch of patents related to exFAT. This means you can't legally implement exFAT without a license to those patents, even if you've never even seen the Samsung code. This is the reason why exfat-fuse is not part of any large Linux distributions.
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Just to nitpick, guy and dude are not gender neutral, they just happened to be heavily used by the community in general, mostly because people assume users are men by default.
Speak for yourself. A lot of people use it as a real gender neutral.
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The majority of Android ROMs (at least from the likes of XDA) are hosted at one of a few places -- goo.im being (probably) the most prevalent. There is 1) little to no warez (I've never seen any), 2) no CAPTCHA and 3) no pop ups and only text ads on goo.im. Another popular one Dev-host ( http://d-h.st/ ) also features none of the cruft you complain about. CyanogenMOD ( http://get.cm/ ) is hosted through several large…
I'm glad to see that things have improved to some degree. I just breifly visited one of those though (androtransfer.com) and it does have the shit I am talking about... "Please wait while we prepare your download! 10 second(s) left" ... how about "No." Proper mirroring does not give you this sort of cruft and hassle. I'll admit, the situation is improved because nobody tried to sell me a penis pump when I visited the…
>"Sort through this 500+ page forum thread, and find the guy who posted a 'fix' without sourcecode that comes in the form of a several rar files from Mega, adding up to 2GB. Oh and by the way, he even included a bunch of pirated gameboy roms for you too!"
You apparently don't give a shit about how things actually work (for the most part); you'd rather disparage them. How about you hop on over and see how many of the "minor" problems are actually fixed in the mainstream distros?
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Morally you might be right. Legally it's a grey area, and practically it's almost certainly a no-go.
So basically company can take your gpld code, extend it, slap their license on the whole thing it and redistiribute binaries without the source code and nobody can slap the gpl back on where it should be because it's a gray area?
The kernel developers and the FSF have always claimed that loadable modules (like the exFat driver) are "derived works", which has a specific meaning in copyright law. In particular, the GPL very clearly says that derived works must be re-licensed under GPL.
The vendors claim that "derived works" doesn't include linked code, or plug-in patterns. They say that they aren't really releasing their own kernel, just releasing the stock kernel with a bunch of proprietary applications on top, along with their proprietary kernel module.
Like that guy said, it's a gray area.