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Does Android Violate the GPL? Not So Fast

Posted by Soulskill on from the sanity-check dept.

jfruhlinger writes "Patent gadfly Florian Mueller's latest post has made a fairly bold claim: that virtually all Android licensees are violating the GPL because of their failure to redistribute the code, and have thus lost their rights to redistribute Android. Mueller here is mostly promoting ideas put across by patent lawyer Edward J. Naughton. But others in the community are skeptical of the claims. Software Freedom Conservancy head Bradley Kuhn says he's never heard from Naughton. 'Don't you think if he was really worried about getting a GPL or LGPL violation resolved, he'd contact the guy in the world most known for doing GPL enforcement and see if I could help?'"

7 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Troll is troll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Florian is a net-kook, not of course on the level of some others like JVM and such. Of course the decade is still young and he has plenty of time to improve his kook ranking

    1. Re:Troll is troll by poetmatt · · Score: 5, Informative

      Why didn't anyone link to the http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110815131443415 (Groklaw Debunk) .

      The writers are soapbox trolls, who have ties to microsoft but have hid them. And they write articles about how GPL violations are in force (which it is the owner's decision to enforce or not)? Say it ain't so!

      It is literally Florian quotes Naughton as his source, yet Naughton is basically a FUD machine.

  2. More Florian? by painandgreed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm beginning to remember the days of Dvorak articles as the happy times.

  3. WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why do you continually link to this sensational asshole astroturder?

    Does Slashdot get kick backs from his ad revenue?

  4. Even if he's right by afidel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even if he's right, do we really want the GPL to be a revokable license where an tiny mistake that might throw you out of compliance requires a Herculean effort to re-establish rights? That would make all GPL code nuclear hot for any and all commercial interests which would probably see 80-90% of all code development on GPL projects dry up.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  5. This fails the "5 seconds of thought" test by jeffmeden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Patent gadfly Florian Mueller's latest post has made a fairly bold claim: that virtually all Android licensees are violating the GPL because of their failure to redistribute the code,

    Hmm, no, actually most (but certainly not 100% of) manufacturers that embed Android comply with the redistribution clause in the GPL. Samsung (one of the biggest vendors) has a web site set up specifically to redistribute code, and others make it similarly easy. Do you really think that the multi billion dollar likes of Samsung, Motorola, HTC, etc didn't bother having a copyright lawyer look over the situation to make sure things are kosher? Surely there are some vendors out there that are abusing the system and not putting up code as required, but if any one of the major vendors did that why not come out and say who it was?

    1. Re:This fails the "5 seconds of thought" test by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In addition, Samsung is extra careful to put up code BEFORE a device is released in most if not all situations.

      The sources for the Rogers variant of the Infuse 4G (SGH-I997R) dropped the Monday before anyone had the device. (Devices showed up two days later on Wednesday.) As I understand it, it was the same with the initial Infuse release on AT&T.

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      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?