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- Hacker News
- Every year a new low.
- Can't help but wonder if making it costly for themselves the entire point. So that they can later turn around and bill that distribution fee to the recipient.by dataflow
- But why? What can be the internal justification? What do they think they win by doing this?by raphinou
- Difficult to say at the moment, but there might be some speculation as to why.
One might be that they dont security patches reverse engineered and vulnerabilities to come out faster (some critical and high severity fixes in GPU drivers/bootloaders were often delayed), and this decision was done long before LLMs were considered powerful/useful for vulnerability research.
Second reason might be simply "Control of the android ecosystem", Google may just want to build a wall around android and make it frustrating for other vendors to compete.
Third, again, this is only speculation, is the current push for electronic ID in the EU and other countries, as well as DRM/copyright protections for media and locally ran LLMs (we've heard of how google pushed small LLMs with chrome updates), if they can do the same on some high end android devices, Google would be more invested into further locking down Android devices.
by D4Ha - Relevant: https://keepandroidopen.org/
> Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.
by TheMiddleMan - Doesn’t Apple do the same?by paxys
- Any word as to whether this will apply to GrapheneOS? If I had to choose, I'd block apps that did comply with this BS.by hedora
- Man, all of these little steps Google is taking to take the control away from the users, not to take over the world or anything else, but to force on you more accurate advertisements. What are we even doing?by spaqin
- “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.
by jmole - Why would it be a "stretch"?
The basic requirement is whether the source code is available - and made available. Are you certain that Google's solution here is ensuring that the source code is easily made available? So many other projects just provide a wget-able link. Why does Google want to make it harder to obtain the source code than those other projects?
> Android has always been more source-open than “open source”.
And what exactly does that mean? I don't know what your words mean here. More source open than open source? Is that a tautology?
> Everything else is essentially all the work of Google and (to some extent) Samsung.
Is it GPLv2? If so then I fail to see why anyone should get higher rights. Everyone gets the same for GPLv2. That's the whole point. I don't understand your statements here.
by shevy-java - > “In violation of GPL” is a stretch.
The originally envisioned distribution method, in fact, was "Send FSF a blank 9-track tape and they'll fill it and mail it back". Nor, obviously, does anything prevent someone who downloads this from Drive from mirroring it on GitHub or wherever.
This is arguably bad stewardship of a historically open source project. It's certainly not a license violation.
by ajross - Open source doesn't imply open to contributions. And you could imagine source available software that's not open source but takes contributions (and this is not theoretical, I've seen this in the wild).
(However, that's quite orthogonal to being a dick about making the source code that you must share available)
by jraph - > 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.
I believe this isn't actually about "Android" at all but rather Pixel. Android is still openly accessible on git. But the kernel sources for Pixel devices is now behind this big song & dance for some fucking inexcusable reason.
by kllrnohj - > Everything else is essentially all the work of Google and (to some extent) Samsung.
There is plenty in Android which isn't the work of Google. For starters the Kotlin implementation and the Java implementation (OpenJDK).
by jsiepkes - Google are absolutely within the letter of the GPL, pedantically so. But maybe not the sprit.
We didn't have git tags when GPL was written in 1989, and while we did have sccs and rcs, (and early versions of cvs) they just weren't that widely used, and generally not used for distribution.
Even when GPL 3.0 was written in 2005-2007, source tarballs were still the primary form of distribution, even though it was starting to become standard to additionally provide anonymous cvs, svn, or one of the brand new distributed systems like git.
But these days git is the primary form of distribution, and source tarballs are noting more an afterthought. Hell, even tags are a bit of an afterthought on many projects. It's basically become the norm to expect an healthy revision history for any open source code.
Based on it's stated goals of "freedom to modify the software you use", IMO if the GPL was written (or updated) today, it would most likely require the distribution of revision history and restrict how much that history can be squashed/rewritten.
by phire - Lack of a specific time limit in GPL doesn't mean there isn't one based on what's reasonable. What they're doing it not reasonable.
> Android has always been more source-open than “open source”.
This is about Pixels rather than AOSP. Google decided Pixels would no longer be supported by AOSP which is why they stopped pushing the kernel drivers, userspace drivers and other Pixel related code to AOSP. They moved to publishing kernel driver code via Google Drive after filling out a Google Forms submission. They're handling those manually. It's a ridiculous system and comes across as them wanting to make it a hassle on purpose. Perhaps that isn't the case and someone simply needs to make the decision to simply push Git tags somewhere else. They could put it on GitHub if the goal is disassociating it from AOSP.
We accepted the archaic new system while they were responding to requests in a reasonable time but that ended. It's now very inconsistent and is regularly getting delayed for weeks or more.
> The vast majority of community contributions that make it into the codebase are security fixes and small bug fixes.
Open source does not imply anything about accepting contributions. SQLite barely takes any contributions and the same applies to many projects. There were a lot more code contributions to AOSP than you're describing prior to recent changes with Android 16. It was relatively easy to contribute to the lower level parts of it.
by grapheneos - 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.by flotzam
- 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 take it in directions that go against Grapheneos principles.
by sunshine-o - > 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 GrapheneOS, won't that make it cheaper for Motorola because they won't have to pay the Google licence (because those GrapheneOS-Motorola phone won't be Google-certified)?
by palata - GPL says that you can give that link to anyone you want.
If someone on HN has received one of these links, feel free to post it here.
by gumby - Not the links per se (those are subject to terms of service), but the contents downloaded for those links are free to share. Anyone can throw them up in their own git repository or upload them to Github.by jeroenhd
- I think - if the code is in fact GPL - you can give the code to anyone you want.
But I would think the link is access to google's servers, which might be different.
by m463 - We need something other than Android, and we need the government to make sure we can run Android apps (like government ID and banking apps) without being spied on. They've been doing whatever the f they like for long enough if you ask me.by teekert
- > We need something other than Android
postmarketOS, Mobian, PureOS, and many more already exist. Support them, if you think it's important.
by fsflover - Huawei have harmony OS that can run android app right ???
EU can have their own counter part but no one footing the bill
by tonyhart7 - No government would like you to use anything else but iOS or a major vendor's Android distribution. Imagine we'd had the freedom... unacceptable.by qwertox
- 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.by doe88
- The purpose of Android for Google is to push users into paid services, Google search, collect some play store fees and some data. None of that actually requires Android to be really open. Just saying something about "open" works as advertisement though...by thyristan
- I don't think the real focus is on the tags, but on the delay here via a form as well as human interaction.
Worded differently, the simplest way to provide the source code is IMO via a URL that you can just wget. At the least this is done by so many projects out there. Google refusing to do so means Google wants to violate the GPLv2, since their alternatives are inferior.
https://distrowatch.com/ has many convenient links to URLs on the left side; I often use that to download the latest and greatest and compile it away, e. g. https://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/9.20.27/bind-9.20.27.tar.xz as a current example, taken from the left panel.
by shevy-java - > Google refusing to do so means Google wants to violate the GPLv2
Not an expert in GPL, but does it say that the source code needs to be provided by a url?
by bitpush