9 karma · joined January 28, 2015
Same thing with OSS licensing. Once you publicly release your code onto the internet, it is out there permanently. Anybody can read it, learn from it, and copy or reproduce it, regardless of whether or not the original developer wants them to. Any copyright or licensing issues are enforced by human laws, only relevant if you live in the country that the laws apply. So again you have companies in places like China who take OSS projects and use the code, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.
And it'd be trivial to compile the latest kernel and load it on your device. Someone who really cares and needs features or fixes from a newer kernel could do it if they wanted.
You do realize that Android does run the Linux kernel, and generally has GNU coreutils available, right?