Comments on: The Sad State of Open Source in Android tablets

By: Francisco d'Anconia

Francisco d'Anconia — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:37:02 +0000

I thought Samsung was supporting open source in its Galaxy Tab. I don know what they are doing but the galaxy tab is an awesome piece of software. Real Estate IDX

By: Longjohn

Longjohn — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:09:53 +0000

I hate Pandigital’s continued and blatant VIOLATION of the GPL v2 license for the Linux Kernel, Busybox, iptables, WPA Supplicant, and libwebcore. After over 18 months Pandigital refuses to make available the Source Code for these things as demanded by the GPL v2 license.

Either cough up the Source Code or stop using this code in violation of Copyright Laws of the USA and other countries

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:03:12 +0000

Even if the companies comply with the GPL you still have the fact that the android driver-like-libs for things like the touchscreen, mpeg accelerator and other features are not open at all due to the horrible copytheft license that Google uses: Apache 2 License. This license means that these manufacturers will simply lock users out and not share at all.

By: Tablet

Tablet — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:35:40 +0000

rooting the Nook seams to popular these days. You can turn it from a e reader into a Tablet in ten minutes and that’s cool.
I just play around with the stuff and really don’t understand all the licensing stuff. Thats why i rarely comment on these issues

By: angus

angus — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:15:41 +0000

Nomad, thanks for the update. . It’s a shame that companies often seem to tick the “GPL source release” box on (or, alternatively, weeks after) launch day, and then never look at it again. Have you contacted B&N to ask where the update is? The gpl-violations Vendor FAQ may be a good page to point them to.

AlexAndro, that’s an unusual comment. I think it’s probably largely self-refuting, but at the very least I would say people certainly have the right to “choose the license they want to use for the software they create”, and I have no problem with that. It becomes a problem when people decide to violate the licenses for other people’s software when they roll it into their own product for sale. That’s what this post is talking about.

Your “programmer working for…” argument seems fairly nonsensical. At the very least, the programmers I personally know who are paid by large companies to work on GPL projects seem very happy and they make good money to boot. All programmers should be so lucky. . As for community & hobbyist development, some people like coding so much they do it in their spare time as well.

By: AlexAndro

AlexAndro — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 09:10:08 +0000

Well, all this is a little bit non realistic. Compagnies like gooogle are perfectly gpl compliant since they do not violate any term of the GPL license agreement at all. For the rest, I think that people have the right to choose the license they want to use for the software they create. I dont see why someone should tell you which license to use. People have the freedom to choose GPL or not. Thank god! Trying to force people to use a certain kind of license is as bad as the imperialism of some compagnies. What do you prefer as a programmer? A big compagny like Microsoft paying you a very good salary for your programming work, rewarding you? Or being Linus Torvald’s slave, working like a slave to promote a GPl system rewarding a few people except you? Because Linus is very rich thanks to the efforts of the community. Because big compagnies make huge profits by selling your software. And guess what, you will never see a cent of it. By promising you a certain kind of freedom not very useful at all for yourself, some people laugh at you and enjoy the real freedom to be rich.

By: Nomad

Nomad — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:08:00 +0000

Sad to say, but B&N Nook source is outdated by and could not be used without patching. Even more, after several weeks of patching and tweaking I found that latest official 1.5 contains some new optimizations that boosts e-ink performance for about 2 times while reading! I had to abandon my own kernel branch cause of this – no one wished to use “custom kernel” that is slower than original

By: La piratería de la que no se habla at Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

La piratería de la que no se habla at Duncan Mac-Vicar P. — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:09:15 +0000

[...] los tablets con Android, se mostró como casi ninguno cumplía con las licencias [...]

By: JoeBorn

JoeBorn — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 01:40:52 +0000

Hi Writing from Neuros, I’m going to be pushing on multiple fronts to get as much source code as possible for our devices. If we can’t get source for the modified android for our tablets, I’d be inclined to work to migrate as quickly as possible to a standard distribution. I’ve already put in an inquiry and, with any luck, we’ll at least be able to figure out what modifications have been made. My guess is that the vast bulk of it will be crapware that’s not of interest anyway.

In my experience, this process takes time. In 2003 when we launched an open source portable audio device, TI contacted us to remove our source because the headers linked to their proprietary code. Today they’ve become increasingly good open source citizens, sponsoring projects and contributing code to mainline. I’ve not worked with VIA/wondermedia before and not being million unit/year customers we may have trouble getting a huge amount of attention, but I will keep all of you posted.

By: Mitchell Tacadina

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