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AOSP Maintainer Quits
In a post on Google+, Jean-Baptiste Quéru, long-time maintainer of the Android Open Source Project, has said he'll no longer be working on it. "There's no point being the maintainer of an Operating System that can't boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support, especially when I'm getting the blame for something that I don't have authority to fix myself and that I had anticipated and escalated more than 6 months ahead." Quéru is referring to the recently-released Nexus 7 revision, for which Google has not provided factory images of Android 4.3. This seems to be because GPU maker Qualcomm is refusing to release the blobs necessary to boot the device.
Just a reminder that the Replicant project is trying to make a completely free and open source version of the Android software stack, including the parts that interface with the hardware.
The GPU in Intel's upcoming Baytrail tablet SoC already has 100% GPL mainline Linux drivers in at least the 3.10 kernel... just sayin'
Except Google will find itself without a Nexus device to sell. Especially since Google has started toning down their Nexus line and starting offering "Google Edition" phones which are stock Android phones.
Because you think companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc care that the drivers are open or not? They sign the NDAs and get access to partial source code they need to create their devices.
As for using obsolete fabs and such - it's still expensive. Masks still cost around $100,000 each, and you need 10 or more of them still for a modern chip, so a tapeout run still costs a couple of million dollars.
FPGAs can be used, but when I used them, the dev systems used FPGAs cost $30K each, and the entire system ran at 10MHz. Oh, and you needed 4 FPGAs to simulate a subset of the chip. (That said, if you have 10 hours or so, Android DOES boot...).
The big problem still is the 3D stuff - all highly patented - implementing an open core will basically violate piles of patents, including many dating all the way back to when companies like S3 existed.
Of course, you can run Android in pure 2D mode, as 2D graphics are mostly patent free, but performance stinks. At the very least, a plain old framebuffer with no hardware acceleration can be implemented using open and free drivers.
Well then good thing the Linux kernel isn't licensed under the GPL. It's licensed under a modified GPL allowing for binary drivers.
Stop spreading misinformation. There is no exception for binary drivers. There is a clarification that the kernel copyright "does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of 'derived work'." User programs; not drivers. Otherwise it's stock GPLv2.
Here's the actual license so you can see for yourself.
A few companies like nVidia get around this by never distributing the drivers with the kernel. In nVidia's case, they use the same driver for Windows and Linux, so they can also argue that there is nothing Linux-specific about the part they're distributing. Even so, many see this as a grey area. The Android case is completely different, both because these are Linux-specific drivers and because they are being distributed with the Linux kernel on the same media as part of a complete operating system. This is just as much a violation of the license as distributing a closed-source program which depends on a GPL library.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Texas Instruments seems good...
Except for the small problem that last year Texas instruments quit making SOCs for tablets and phones...