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Comment by paolovictor | Hacker News Reader

The title is a little misleading, it led me to believe that it was about Android app developers, not custom distro developers.

That being said, I'm a bit thorn on this. From the developer side, Samsung seem a bit too prickly, specially when Android is touted as an "open" platform. On Samsung's side, it has no obligation whatsoever to provide all the data and source when asked.

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Obligation, no. But they seem to have "promised" devices and support for the CM dev team (I may have misunderstood that though.). They got the devices, but not the support. So i think it's fair enough of that guy to call them out on it. Don't promise things you won't keep. At least not to people that you want to keep around. (Whyever they would care about CM...)

In fact, as far as I understood, they do have an obligation, because the (GPL licensed) kernel requires them to release source code for some parts of the system

They've released the stuff their obliged to release under the GPL, that's not the problem. However they also promised to release more, and now apparently have no intention on following up on that promise.

When you play in big business level, except from marketing statements, there's no such thing as open. In this context, open was touted by Google as an advantage over iOS just to get mind share. Give them time and they'll tear this notion apart. Samsung already started.

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