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Comment by ajju | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to take the author's claims of infringement seriously because of his laughable claim that third party applications such as Angry Birds running on top of Android would have to be open sourced under GPL if actual infringement is found in Android.

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The reason is that Angry Birds is written in C and certainly accesses the Linux kernel, almost certainly using the Bionic library. If that one is GPL'd, Angry Birds has to be GPL'd. GPL copyleft affects derivative works, and compiling a library into your program is a clear case of a derivative work.

I think people are objecting to this rather extreme worse case scenario because the C library can just use the LGPL, there is no situation where it has to be full GPL. (Or else how does glibc get away with being LGPL?)

glibc is LGPL'd because the kernel maintainers create it under the LGPL and all Linux kernel contributors know and accept that. But third parties can't just take code and relicense it. Otherwise why not take all of Linux and relicense it under BSD or Apache? ;-)

I find it hard to believe that it's impossible to make a glibc competitor that is LGPL and uses kernel headers. Could you point me to some opinions that you're basing this on?

Edward Naughton, a prominent IP litigator, said in his Huffington Post article on this that he's skeptical of Google's approach because he believes the header material they copied is likely copyrightable. If it's copyrightable, it can't just be relicensed by third parties.

During all those years that Linux has been around, no one other than Google has tried to take this kind of material from the original kernel headers and publish it under any license other than the GPL. And no one has tried to do an alternative glibc. I guess what someone would do is take glibc and fork it on LGPL terms.

Eh wha? No-one has tried to do an alternative glibc? Wrong:

http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/

http://www.uclibc.org/

http://sourceware.org/newlib/

Does any of those libraries gut the original Linux kernel headers the way Bionic does? Not as far as I can see.

You can build libraries if you like, but you can't just put header code under a different license unless you're the original right holder or have the original right holder's consent.

You said that no-one has tried to do an alternative to glibc. I proved you wrong. I never made any statements on anything else you said, so really I am not sure what you are arguing for or against...

No, no, no. That's wrong. It's the "viral" misinterpretation of the GPL at work. Angry Birds code belongs to Angry Birds' developers, period. They get to decide its license, period. There are no circumstances under which "Angry Birds has to be GPL'd". None.

The issue at hand is whether or not the Angry Birds Android port constitutes a derived work of the kernel (a pretty strained case, IMHO, given that it's a straightforward port of a game from another non-linux platform). If it is, then it can only be distributed under the GPL -- that is, it'd have to be pulled from the market. At no point does it get removed from its owner's control.

>The issue at hand is whether or not the Angry Birds Android port constitutes a derived work of the kernel (a pretty strained case, IMHO, given that it's a straightforward port of a game from another non-linux platform). If it is, then it can only be distributed under the GPL -- that is, it'd have to be pulled from the market. At no point does it get removed from its owner's control.

The FSF states that if any program links against GPL licensed libraries, it is a derivative work, and therefore needs to be under GPL as well. The LGPL was created specifically to allow linking by code from other licenses.

While the Angry Birds code still belongs to the Angry Birds developers. However, if Google is guilty of a GPL violation, and are unable to get a LGPL licensed wrapper around the code, Angry Birds for Android may need to be distributed under the GPL to avoid a violation.

Most likely, Google will find a way to make an LGPL wrapper, and this entire issue won't matter.

It is not true that if e.g. Angry Birds was found to violate the GPL that its developers would be forced to release it under the GPL. _Please_ read this article: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851 .

but they couldn't keep distributing on Android without releasing as a GPL-compatible license (same article as ref).

Sure, that would be one of their options. I just wanted to make it clear that doing so would be an _option_ and not something like a court injunction. A lot of people seem to think that if you are found to be in violation of the GPL, that somehow you will be immediately forced to release your source code to the whole world.

Rovio will still never be forced to distribute Angry Birds under the GPL, even if they are found to be a derived work by association. Being found of infringement just means they have to stop distributing Angry Birds, in it's infringing form. Once the infringement is fixed, Rovio can then distribute the non-infringing form of Angry Birds without having to license it as GPL.

If however, Rovio wants to continue distributing the infringing form of Angry Birds, they only license they are legally allowed to use for that is the GPL.

But at no point is Rovio ever forced to distribute a GPL licensed version of Angry Birds.

It is true that Rovio isn't forced by anyone to create a GPL version or to release their code. I should have pointed this out.

However, their options are pretty limited, considering they want to make money off of the software. They could simply stop distributing it from the platform. But they want to make money, which means that they(presumably) want to get as many sales of the game as possible on as many platforms as possible.

However, if the main system interface is GPL(and not LGPL), the GPL does not allow anything to link against it that is not GPL code. So, given that, they are effectively forced to do it if they want to get any further sales and ad revenue on the Android platform, because they would not be able to distribute the game in it's current version.

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