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Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

> Forking Android is not a big deal, and huge companies like Amazon do it for its FireOS. The difference is that Amazon is upfront about it and says "FireOS is a fork of Android" in the first paragraph of its developer documents. Huawei's developer documents don't reference Android and are mostly pure gibberish—and by that I mean they are paragraphs of buzzwords and circular links that don't actually communicate any technical information about what the OS is or how it works.

One question: IF there is a CHANCE that the entire OS is indeed just a `sed s/Android/whatever/g AOSP/`, is it legal (for a company that large) to do that?

If it is, please call me the creator of RobotOSxxx OS (Which really fuzzwords could not may Android) from now on.

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Why wouldn’t it be legal? As long as the fork complies with all software licenses.

This happens all the time by large and small companies, orgs and individuals: Amazons FireOS is an Android fork, Amazons opensearch distro is an elasticsearch fork, LibreOffice is an OpenOffice fork, Mate is Gnome3 fork, Jenkins is a Hudson fork, Google’s blink is a fork of WebKit, etc.

I've been reading Chinese posts on the network, a lots of people are actually debating whether or not the OS is related to (not solidly based on) Android due to the confusion. I'm personally also not sure about the fact too, because there is no source code to confirm that.

Based on my understanding of the copyright law and licenses, in addition to keep the same license, the fork must also display/state the original authors in their copyright declarations. There are also implications on the patent front.

> One question: IF there is a CHANCE that the entire OS is indeed just a `sed s/Android/whatever/g AOSP/`, is it legal (for a company that large) to do that?

Only replacing the string would probably not be enough, but if they also addressed trademarks and copyrighted stuff wouldn't that be more or less that CentOS does ?

I don't think so. But it is a Chinese company so its not the first time where they basically just did a copy and replace. Google doesn't wants to piss off the Chinese govt either by trying to shut down Huawei.

Isn’t the whole reason for Harmony to make sure Google can’t shut down Huawei?

Huawei devices shipped with Android before the US banned them from doing so. Whining that they copied an open-source as product as a result is the height of hypocrisy.

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