321–330 of 350 posts
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Compliance with the intent of the law is one of the things courts get to decide on. Someone just needs to be crazy enough to sue (and rich/lucky enough to win)
Just need a lawyer looking for an interesting class action, to be honest. All gOS users can be in the class.
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Alas, the licences have become outdated and we haven't kept up, because most have played by the spirit of the rules up to this point. There is an expectation that source code will be readily available using modern tooling, like a version control system, but that's not what the licences actually require.
GPL requires that source code be in the preferred form for making modifications. If you use source control for your own modifications, then that's obviously the preferred form and you must distribute the source in that form.
“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.
GrapheneOS is arguing that throwing away the metadata of however many commits and squashing them into a messy tarball is not the "preferred form of the work for making modifications", and that a manual process where you have to fill out a form in order to get a Google Drive link a week later is not "a medium customarily used for software interchange" in current times. Those are quotes from the GPLv2.
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Well to be fair you didn't say that in the linked tweet. Delay is bad too, but again the original spirit of the license was absolutely OK with the idea of weeks-long delays. Our modern world of instant github access has spoiled us, but courts are not going to see damages from just "we had to ship a month late" unless you can show something more specific.
It's required for providing timely security patches. It's not hard to show why that's important and Google engineers have written plenty about it for us to cite. We've managed to avoid delays for security patches so far through reverse engineering and other workarounds. Having to invest time from developers paid to work on GrapheneOS in reverse engineering compiled GPLv2 code shows Google is violating the GPLv2.
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So you're saying Google should stop open sourcing Android? That should like a bad incentive to make to defend Apple.
Apple is at least honest at that point. Google claims an openness that doesn’t exist anymore
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So you're saying Google should stop open sourcing Android? That should like a bad incentive to make to defend Apple.
Google has no choice, the moment they stop releasing Android sources, a chinese consortium will just take over and they will lose ownership of Android
They stopped pushing tags for any of the Pixel kernel or userspace driver repositories to AOSP. They also stopped pushing AOSP releases specific to Pixels which is why AOSP now only gets yearly releases, QPR2 releases and security backports to both of those. Other OEMs use the yearly and theoretically also the QPR2 releases. Both the yearly and QPR2 releases get monthly security backports. Since they dropped Pixel su…
> GPL doesn't set a standard time limit for providing the sources, but that doesn't mean they can delay it indefinitely The GPL doesn’t require them to provide the sources to the world; it requires them to provide it only to those who are in possession of the object code, and even then, _if_ they sell the product with a written offer to get the source code (¿Do they?): - only upon request, - only for three years or f…
"b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party,..."
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> GPL doesn't set a standard time limit for providing the sources, but that doesn't mean they can delay it indefinitely The GPL doesn’t require them to provide the sources to the world; it requires them to provide it only to those who are in possession of the object code, and even then, _if_ they sell the product with a written offer to get the source code (¿Do they?): - only upon request, - only for three years or f…
> The GPL doesn’t require them to provide the sources to the world; I don't see how this is relevant. The people making the request are within those boundaries. The rest is moot. The spirit of the GPL is that graphene is entitled to the GPLd source in some way and google must reasonably comply.
Don't get me wrong, I still think this is shitty behavior from Google.