If the court ended up forcing Google to sell Android, shouldn’t we worry that its license as an open source project could be removed and then it become proprietary?
If the court ended up forcing Google to sell Android, shouldn’t we worry that its license as an open source project could be removed and then it become proprietary?
This is entirely untrue.
Only in the state that it is right now. Google could at any point simply stop releasing the source code with no warning and make all further modifications proprietary.
That is only true for copyleft licenses. Licenses that are merely “open source” (also called “permissive”) such as the Apache License 2.0 which the AOSP is licensed under do not give two hoots about what you do with the code as long as you give appropriate credit.
The only part of Android that has a copyleft license is the Linux kernel (GPLv2) and I wouldn’t really consider it part of the AOSP in practice.
It’s not entirely untrue. You did however add some relevant details. Thank you for making this more precise.
The point is: Android phone owners would still be fine if Google went full-proprietary at some point. A majority of the code would/could be forked and maintained.
Or a project like GrapheneOS that’s already based on Android code would be expanded to fill the void.
What makes you think that? If you’ve ever taken a look at the AOSP source code, you’ll know that it’s insanely huge. This isn’t something a small community of volunteers can reasonably maintain; just like a web browser.
Again, who do you expect to take on that insane task?
GrapheneOS is regular-ass android with some modifications to make it more secure on top. It’s not “based on Android” it is (mostly) Android. It does some important modifications but that’s details, not basic functionality.
If Google were to cut updates to Android, GrapheneOS would (rightly) make a stink but ultimately have to cease because they cannot maintain the entire rest of the Android code to keep it secure. I suspect they’d rather (loudly) end the project than keep limping along without proper security patches.
Again, your specificity is appreciated.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me Android devices are too important to just let them be abandoned if Google goes full-proprietary. It wouldn’t just be volunteers. Many companies have a huge stake in this OS and would continue to contribute.
I wish it’d be that way.
If they don’t contribute now, I doubt they would then. They don’t have any incentive in making the AOSP better publicly because that also makes it better for their competitors.
I think all the OEMs would have individual contracts for source code access anyways. It’s not like open source is the only possible model for industry-wide code collaboration.