Yeah the installation requirement is silly. But android in general is plagued by GPL violations in that every single piece of it is linux based (or other GPL code based), and yet no user will ever get the source no matter how much they ask.
Is it? From my reading, much of the GPL v2/v3 divide comes from different expectations of what GPL is intended to achieve. One camp (e.g. Linus) believes that the goal is to ensure that the freely available product is the best product, that all improvements that are distributed can make their way back to the freely available repo. The other camp (e.g. Stallman) believes that the primary goal is to ensure that end users have control over their computers. That any software distributed to them can be modified to suit the end user's needs.
These are both valid viewpoints, and both camps thought the GPLv2 fit their needs, at the time of its writing. When TiVo found a loophole that satisfied one interpretation of the letter of GPLv2, but violated the its spirit as seen by the second camp, the GPLv3 was made to make explicit what was previously potentially ambiguous in the GPLv2.
That it all to say, I think it's premature to dismiss the viewpoint of Stallman's camp as "silly".
GPLv3 only goal is exclusively to twart bad actors from using needlessly complex things with the sole goal of avoiding GPLv2 (and 3 since they are practicaly the same) goals, which is to provide source for code that was originally GPL'ed.
In Tivo specific case, that needlesly complex thing was a rubegoldberg build/install process. Also TIVO did not find a loophole. They provided the code as their shenanigans was exposed as such in the end.
Note that you are commenting under an article which main point was exactly to dismiss the misunderstanding in pop culture about the TIVO case! and here you are repeating it. sigh.
In other words, if Linus says "GPLv2 doesn't require kernel installation on hardware it gets ported to and sold on", then GPLv2 doesn't for the Linux kernel, or at least the parts of it Linus owns. (In practice, a good chunk of the core kernel dev team believes this and has said so, so this also applies for them, too.)
That being said, you are correct that interpretation-related estoppels and/or implied license amendments probably wouldn't save most Android vendors, since their violations are not limited to just Installation Instructions. I know of nothing that Linus has said that would make statically linking all your drivers into a kernel with no source release OK. However, the post I was replying to was specifically talking about locked bootloaders; not that.
it's utter nonsense and pure FUD.
the article everyone is talking about is about valid cases where the build is used a extra step to try to work around the GPL (akin to saying "the developer used gloves to make the code changes to the GPL'd code so it doesn't count as change", it's stupid). but as the author argee, even pointing that stupidity out is bad because it is used as fuel for the actual FUD where people using GPL correctly are mislead about what they must share
Hopefully someone like Linus can make absolutely clear this is total garbage.
The source code is released.
No one disagrees there.
Buy unlocked hardware if you care about this. Most PC's can disable secure boot paths through BIOS settings unless you are in a corp environment and they lock that out.
Hell, even v3 is insufficient for what Stallman wants; it only requires being able to install new versions of the covered code. It doesn't cover other proprietary programs that can see if you've modified the Free program and refuse to work. You can't actually prohibit that with a license unless you want to go full Ethical Source and start impinging on Freedom Zero.
Yes, this may not mesh with Linus's intent, but Linus already has a very specific idea of how the GPL works that applies to Linux and only Linux. The whole "you can load proprietary kernel modules as long as they don't touch internals" thing springs to mind.
Also, I'd like to point out that people haven't "lost the fight" with GPLv3. There's plenty of libraries out there that use it - they're just not particularly relevant to Linux, so nobody's really pushing for a relicensing effort.