Bradley Kuhn: Questioning The Original Analysis On The Bionic Debate | Hacker News Reader

Bradley Kuhn: Questioning The Original Analysis On The Bionic Debate

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16 pointsbiehl7 comments

Brad Kuhn has an interesting take on modifying large codebases: "If someone actually does all the research to prove that Google did, I'd easily offer a 1,000-to-1 bet to anyone that such a copyright infringement could be cleared up easily [...]"

I've been in the software industry for more than two decades, and I've worked with such companies as Blizzard Entertainment (I actually edited a small part of the C source code of Warcraft II - Tides of Darkness, for an example). I know and I'm sure pretty much every reader here knows that it's never just a quick and simple thing to change something in such a large and interwoven codebase as Android.

Any change can result in unforeseeable run-time issues even in parts of the codebase where it seems counterintuitive.

I don't deny that it's doable -- in my own blog post on this I advocate replacing Bionic with glibc. I don't claim it will take five years. But the idea that this can be done in no time and without any risk of incompatibilities and other issues flies in the face of everything any technical decision-maker at any significant software company would say.

It may work in a "release early, release often" world. I doubt that the likes of Samsung and Motorola plan to "release early, release often" their Android-based devices.

Such an absurd downplaying of the issue calls into question that Brad Kuhn seriously wants a solution. It seems he just wants to be an apologist.

Brad Kuhn says: "Google wasn't seeking to circumvent the GPL at all." That's wrong. Not only did Google throw out numerous GPL notices from the original headers, but it explicitly stated in the context of Bionic its goal to "keep [the] GPL out of user-space" on page 36 of this official presentation: http://androidteam.googlecode.com/files/Anatomy-Physiology-o...

I already pointed to that from my blog post on the Bionic story (http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/03/googles-android-face...) but just wanted to show this example of a definitive error in Kuhn's generally very unconvincing blog post.

I think he's saying that the Android developers in question don't have a proper understanding of the GPL, and rather than trying to circumvent it, they were trying to circumvent the LGPL.

Which as he said, is pointless, because you can write a proprietary or BSD-licensed application and interface with the LGPL without any problems. The only reason to do what they did is if they wanted to distribute a full kernel that works like Linux, but is BSD-licensed. Obviously they did no such thing, nor did they even attempt to do so.

Google is full of very smart people. Wouldn't it be smarter, if they wanted a BSD-licensed Linux workalike running on ARM, to start from, say, NetBSD?

Brad Kuhn writes: "But, to deny that it's possible to rewrite a C library for Linux under a license that isn't GPLv2 would also imply immediately the (incorrect) conclusion that [...]"

This is pointless and may mislead some readers.

Without a doubt it's possible to do a non-GPL library. In fact, my blog post on this subject advocated glibc all the way, which is LGPL'd, not GPL'd.

But the fact that it's possible (if done right) doesn't mean that Google's reprocessing and repurposing of the material in question is in line with copyright law and the GPL.

I never had a second thought on what would LGPL compliance be and why it would be an advantage to developers have a BSD-style library instead of an LGPL one.

Any license-lawyer wants to elaborate on that?

The advantage of a BSD style license over any version of the GPL, even LGPL, is that the developers don't have to worry about compliance, they can just focus on their design and code. That is the primary reason I prefer the WTFPL license; even if what I want to do is permitted by a more restrictive license, under the WTFPL I don't have to even spend any time or thought trying to figure out whether or not it is permitted.

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