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Comment by Samuel_Michon | Hacker News Reader

“They open source a browser and an operating system to sell other stuff.”

No, those were already open source before Google got involved, so Google didn’t really have a choice.

Uh, no. None of them existed before Google. What did exist were two pieces of infrastructure (Webkit and the Linux kernel), and Google could've used both without open-sourcing the rest of the application, since the licenses allow it:

- Webkit is LGPL/BSD, so it can be linked to proprietary code without forcing its redistribution.

- The Linux kernel is GPL, but the license has never applied to userspace code, and everything "above" is either written by Google or non-copyleft open source code.

I think it's only reasonably for Google to contribute some after getting so much from open source projects, but that doesn't mean they didn't have the legal choice to do otherwise.

Google's wet dream is Linux kernel under BSD license.

Really? Why not use a BSD kernel then? And don't say because Linux is so much more advanced: for what Google would use it for, FreeBSD would do just fine.

thats a silly thing to say. BSD licensed Unix already exists. if they wanted to build a proprietary OS on top of it (as Apple did) they would have. the fact that they already decided not to is the entire point here. Google chose GPL Licensed Linux over BSD Licensed Unix. From a technical perspective there's not a whole lot of difference. The license is the more important difference and we already know which they chose.

> as Apple did

Apple didn’t build a proprietary OS on top of BSD licensed UNIX. They used the core of NEXTSTEP, which in turn used parts of several different BSD distros (though not its kernel or driver system).

Wait... so Android Inc didn't exist for the 2 years between its founding in 2003 and Google's acquisition in 2005?

Oh, I was actually thinking of ChromeOS. But the point still stands, since they owned the copyright, and therefore they did have a choice to keep the userspace closed.

So were BSD and KHTML, and yet when Apple built OS X and iOS and Safari on top of them, they did it closed-source.

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