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Comment by Solinoid | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain further how Google is possibly at fault here? Legitimately ignorant of the situation.

Google is currently developing an alternate kernel which will be MIT licensed. They've been removing GPL from userspace as fast as they can, and now it seems they want to remove it from the whole system.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/15/12480566/google-fuchsia-ne...

https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta/blob/master/LICENS...

I doubt that the primary motivation for Magenta is to eliminate the GPL'd Linux kernel from Android. A much more practical way to do that would be to use one of the BSDs.

They also deprecated GCC from the NDK, going forward only clang will be supported.

GCC is still around, because just like it happened with Apple, there are a few features that clang still lacks in order to fully replace it in the context of Android.

Brillo has even less GPL components than Android.

Out of curiosity, will this end custom ROMs?

Not necessarily, but it will be harder work reverse-engineering what OEMs do without the modified kernel source releases

I don't think you can legitimately say that Google are hampering open source by releasing more open source software. You might argue that they're stepping back from the GPL, but that's different.

I bet in around 10 years time, the GPL will be surely missed, but then it will be too late.

+1 Even today Android is falsely advertised as open source while in fact you can't install the OSS version on any phone and expect it to work without proprietary blobs. Thank closed device drivers for that, and more restrictions will come in the future.

Right now the OSS community should focus their efforts on the most important goal: having fully open source hardware CPUs and peripherals. We already have huge loads of open source software but we still lack a comparatively open iron to run them on.

Well, RISC-V is coming and some of that will be fully open source, freely licensed hardware. For example: http://www.lowrisc.org/

Peripherals are a lot more tricky. RISC-V is concentrating on the CPU cores, cache hierarchy and interrupt controller. Peripherals will be proprietary for a while, but could be open source one day.

The entire ARM ecosystem is basically Google and ARM. Google is using open source Linux to power Android but all the hardware drivers are closed. The only reason you cannot simply install and use Linux on any Android device is the closed source drivers.

Yet these drivers exists and work perfectly for Android which is the Linux kernel, so why are they not being made available after all these years?

If there was any interest in open source by Arm or Google they would make some minimum intiatives to makes the drivers available but not a single initiative exists.

There have been multiple discussion on Ars and HN itself about Google's relations with Android and open source..

[1]http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

What does Google have anything to do with this? If there are companies to blame for the sorry state of open source on ARM, that would be Qualcomm, Broadcom, and other SoC makers.

That might be the entire mobile ecosystem (although that sounds too simplistic, still, you are forgetting Linaro), but the ARM ecosystem also includes M-profile (deep embedded), R-profile (RTOS) and server-class (SBSA and "almost" designs like Octeon-TX and Tegra X1). The ARM server ecosystem is most definitely a bunch of software and hardware players, and Google is not a significant presence there FWIW.

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