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Do you really think the legal picture would be any different if Android were under copyleft?

• ajross 14y ago
  Of course not, that wasn't my point at all. I think the community picture would be very different if Android had inherited the infrastructure and community of desktop linux instead of charging ahead with needless and inferior reimplementations of glibc, udev, init/upstart/systemd, rpm/dpkg, etc... in a way that cut them off from the rest of the linux community. Ubuntu and Fedora users can package stuff for others in a robust way, including modifications to the system libraries. How nice would it be to fix the awful accelerometer polling on the Galaxy Nexus and point users to a RPM repo? Try out some new gesture tuning? See the point? That kind of work exists, sort of, in the Android world, but it sucks rocks. And the reason for all this breakage was, ostensibly, "IP purity" and the desire to avoid law suits and ambiguity about the software licensing. Which, as it happens, was a fools errand anyway as the platform is being sued regardless. Is it clear now what I'm saying?