Does Android Violate the GPL? Not So Fast 186
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?'"
Troll is troll (Score:3, Informative)
Florian is a net-kook, not of course on the level of some others like JVM and such. Of course the decade is still young and he has plenty of time to improve his kook ranking
Re:Troll is troll (Score:5, Informative)
Why didn't anyone link to the http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110815131443415 (Groklaw Debunk) [groklaw.net].
The writers are soapbox trolls, who have ties to microsoft but have hid them. And they write articles about how GPL violations are in force (which it is the owner's decision to enforce or not)? Say it ain't so!
It is literally Florian quotes Naughton as his source, yet Naughton is basically a FUD machine.
Re:Even if he's right (Score:2, Informative)
I wouldn't call failing to distribute the source a "tiny mistake".
http://android.git.kernel.org/ [kernel.org]
Looks distributed enough to me.
And I know that's only the kernel -- but that's all that matters. The userspace stuff isn't "derived" and thus doesn't have to be licensed under the GPL.
And I also know that the above is a Google-provided site, not one provided by the handset manufacturer. But that doesn't matter either as long as the handset manufacturer doesn't himself modify the GPLed parts of Android (i.e. the kernel) and then fails to distribute the source for that. As long as the handset manufacturer just distributes the Android kernel as-is, the source code is available under the above link, and that's it.