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.

Comments

Re:It's Qualcomm's decision to make

[JesseMcDonald]

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.