Joakim Posted in reply to ketmar



Permalink Reply

On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 15:05:05 UTC, ketmar via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:46:33 +0000 > Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce > <digita lmars-d- announce@ puremagic.com> wrote: > >> On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 11:35:54 UTC, ketmar via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: >> > On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 07:22:13 +0000 >> > Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce >> > <digita lmars-d- announce@ puremagic.com> wrote: >> > >> >> This is the model used by Android, the most successful open source project ever >> > i can assure you that stupid policy with separating features has >> > nothing to do with android popularity. >> >> I can assure you that it's _the_ reason it took off so much. If the Android project had insisted on pure open source, the hardware and smartphone vendors would have laughed at them and used Windows Mobile or LiMo or one of the myriad other alternatives at the time. >> >> It's why Samsung has their own proprietary multi-window implementation for Android and Amazon and Xiaomi forked Android and released their own proprietary versions. Commercial vendors want to differentiate with their own proprietary features, but AOSP provides a common OSS platform on which they can work together. >> >> This model has been extraordinarily successful for AOSP, as it has led to a billion smartphones running some version of Android and capable of running most common apps, albeit with some fragmentation too. > > what you described here is a matter of licensing (BSDL vs GPL), not > having some closed-source patches. Which of those OSS licenses are the proprietary features and blobs I listed offered under? None, and the choice of license is critical because you cannot offer closed-source patches under the viral GPL, ie it is the BSDL/Apache permissive licenses that make this winning mixed model possible. If your point is that AOSP is released as pure open source, no Android phone is sold running pure AOSP, including Nexus devices because of binary blob drivers. Without the proprietary add-ons, AOSP would be unusable.