This title is an extreme framing of the situation. A similar title would be "The Huawei Travesty Reveals Microsoft's Iron Grip on Windows NT". Yes, copyright i

This title is an extreme framing of the situation. A similar title would be "The Huawei Travesty Reveals Microsoft's Iron Grip on Windows NT". Yes, copyright is a thing, and if you own a copyright, you are entitled to control its copying through license agreements. To characterize that as an "Iron Grip" is quite strange, as short of releasing all of this investment as open source, there is no other kind of "grip" that Google is entitled to. Google has invested billions of dollars into applications and infrastructure for their most successful Linux distro, and yes, they own the copyright to that. As far as I'm aware, Google does not market their current Android distro as "open source" to any great extent, so why is it more of a problem than any other piece of popular proprietary software? What about the millions of Linux-based kiosks, pub games consoles, and giant social media and advertising juggernauts who also have proprietary software that they sell access to?