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>Part of the motivation is certainly to get away from the GPL requirements of using Linux, so that Google and its partners can release products to users that ha

>Part of the motivation is certainly to get away from the GPL requirements of using Linux, so that Google and its partners can release products to users that have proprietary modifications to the kernel, without giving those same users access to the source code of the kernel. That would of course be a disaster for user autonomy and freedom, but why should Google care about that... I've heard this argument before without any factual evidence to back it up. Google could have easily used the FreeBSD kernel and not had to deal with the GPL if they had wanted to.

tyingq 9y ago
Google didn't invent Android though, they bought it. Fast time to market probably trumped all other concerns at the time. This project probably has a less aggressive timeline.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  I'm not sure what that has to do with it. Apple didn't invent OSX/MacOS either, they bought it from NeXT and then used that base to build iOS. Google bought Android in 2005 so they had plenty of time to switch out kernels if licensing concerns were really a factor for them.
  - CountSessine 9y ago
    Would they? Especially given that they'd already heavily modified their fork to meet their specific needs with ashmem, binder, and logcat? And the fact that they pretty much completely changed direction with user-space development in 2007 to meet the iPhone and not BB? I seriously doubt they had time to switch to a more user-hostile kernel, given what was already in place. Especially given that they had their hands full programming a user-hostile libc and a user-hostile driver framework that would help hardware vendors with their user-hostile driver-blobs.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]