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Does Android Violate the GPL? Not So Fast 186

Posted by Soulskill
from the sanity-check dept.
jfruhlinger writes "Patent gadfly Florian Mueller's latest post has made a fairly bold claim: that virtually all Android licensees are violating the GPL because of their failure to redistribute the code, and have thus lost their rights to redistribute Android. Mueller here is mostly promoting ideas put across by patent lawyer Edward J. Naughton. But others in the community are skeptical of the claims. Software Freedom Conservancy head Bradley Kuhn says he's never heard from Naughton. 'Don't you think if he was really worried about getting a GPL or LGPL violation resolved, he'd contact the guy in the world most known for doing GPL enforcement and see if I could help?'"
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Does Android Violate the GPL? Not So Fast More

Does Android Violate the GPL? Not So Fast

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  • More Florian? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by painandgreed (692585) on Monday August 15, 2011 @04:46PM (#37099164)
    I'm beginning to remember the days of Dvorak articles as the happy times.

  • WTF (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15, 2011 @04:46PM (#37099166)

    Why do you continually link to this sensational asshole astroturder?

    Does Slashdot get kick backs from his ad revenue?

  • Even if he's right (Score:5, Insightful)

    by afidel (530433) on Monday August 15, 2011 @04:48PM (#37099188)
    Even if he's right, do we really want the GPL to be a revokable license where an tiny mistake that might throw you out of compliance requires a Herculean effort to re-establish rights? That would make all GPL code nuclear hot for any and all commercial interests which would probably see 80-90% of all code development on GPL projects dry up.

  • Florian Mueller (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15, 2011 @04:49PM (#37099210)

    Who the fuck is Florian Mueller and why should I care about what he has to say?

  • This fails the "5 seconds of thought" test (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jeffmeden (135043) on Monday August 15, 2011 @04:55PM (#37099280) Homepage Journal

    Patent gadfly Florian Mueller's latest post has made a fairly bold claim: that virtually all Android licensees are violating the GPL because of their failure to redistribute the code,

    Hmm, no, actually most (but certainly not 100% of) manufacturers that embed Android comply with the redistribution clause in the GPL. Samsung (one of the biggest vendors) has a web site set up specifically to redistribute code, and others make it similarly easy. Do you really think that the multi billion dollar likes of Samsung, Motorola, HTC, etc didn't bother having a copyright lawyer look over the situation to make sure things are kosher? Surely there are some vendors out there that are abusing the system and not putting up code as required, but if any one of the major vendors did that why not come out and say who it was?

"Freedom is still the most radical idea of all." -- Nathaniel Branden

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