this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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The future of Android as an Open Source project (lemdro.id)
submitted 15 hours ago by chottomatte@lemdro.id to c/askandroid@lemdro.id
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If the court ended up forcing Google to sell Android, shouldn't we worry that its license as an open source project could be removed and then it become proprietary?

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[–] Zachariah@lemmy.world 13 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Any part that is already open source will eternally be open source. Furthermore, there are rules about using open source code in projects that requires them to also be open source.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

This is entirely untrue.

Any part that is already open source will eternally be open source.

Only in the state that it is right now. Google could at any point simply stop releasing the source code with no warning and make all further modifications proprietary.

there are rules about using open source code in projects that requires them to also be open source.

That is only true for copyleft licenses. Licenses that are merely "open source" (also called "permissive") such as the Apache License 2.0 which the AOSP is licensed under do not give two hoots about what you do with the code as long as you give appropriate credit.

The only part of Android that has a copyleft license is the Linux kernel (GPLv2) and I wouldn't really consider it part of the AOSP in practice.

[–] Zachariah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 minute ago

It’s not entirely untrue. You did however add some relevant details. Thank you for making this more precise.

The point is: Android phone owners would still be fine if Google went full-proprietary at some point. A majority of the code would/could be forked and maintained.

Or a project like GrapheneOS that’s already based on Android code would be expanded to fill the void.