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Comment by mondoshawan | Hacker News Reader

GPL is the problem. Hardware vendors won't touch it with a 10k foot pole because of the requirement to redistribute patches.

There's a history of wanting BSD licenses at Android's inception. If the BSD distributions hadn't run into problems relating to legal battles at the time, Android would be built on Mach with a BSD userland rather than Linux. Additionally, there was more vendor support and drivers for the Linux kernel than Mach. Sadly, for the fledgeling enterprise that was Android, it was better to start from Linux, and use Apache/BSD style licensing and write their own userland.

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> If the BSD distributions hadn't run into problems relating to legal battles at the time, Android would be built on Mach with a BSD userland rather than Linux.

What legal battles were there? Wikipedia puts Android being started in 2003 [0] and then only legal battle I recall with BSD having settled in 1994 [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

Android's development started long before Android became a company officially, and there was more fallout from those BSD lawsuits than what is officially reported in Wikipedia -- especially since the settlement agreement included that those that agreed must keep silent.

Also many hardware vendors use their stack to differentiate themselves from other competitors as at the end they tend to 'do' the same things. That stack keeps at bay people just copying their design wholesale and then undercutting their margin and using their drivers. Then even if they are willing, they many times included some lib they bought from someone else. They may even have the full code to use and have changed it as needed. But that 3rd party is usually some consulting group and guess what one of the very few things they sell is. It is a huge mess.

> Sadly, for the fledgeling enterprise that was Android, it was better to start from Linux, and use Apache/BSD style licensing and write their own userland.

Curious about your take on this. Why do you think it would be better if Android were mach kernel + BSD userland akin to Mac/IOS instead of Linux?

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