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CopperheadOS Fights Unlicensed Installations On Nexus Phones (xda-developers.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Earlier this week security-hardened Android build CopperheadOS temporarily blocked Nexus updates on its servers after finding out that other companies have been flashing the ROM onto Nexus phones and selling them commercially in violation of the CopperheadOS licensing terms. The incident highlights an inherent problem in getting open source to be used by the masses: the difficulty of organizations being able to build and monetize a successful, long-term open source business model...
"We've enabled over-the-air updates again," CopperheadOS tweeted Saturday, "to avoid impacting our remaining customers on Nexus devices and other legitimate users. However, downloads on the site will no longer be available and we'll be making changes to the update client for Nexus devices."
In an earlier series of tweets, they explained it's an ongoing issue. "It's not okay to disrespect our non-commercial licensing terms for those official builds by flashing and selling it on hundreds of phones... This is why we've been unable to sell access to Pixel images. There are people that are going to buy those and flash + sell devices in direct competition with us in violation of the licensing terms. Needing to deal with so many people acting in bad faith makes this difficult.
"It's not permitted for our official Nexus builds and yet that's what's happening. We do all of the development, testing, release engineering and we provide the infrastructure, and then competitors sell far more devices than us in violation of our licensing terms. Ridiculous."
"We've enabled over-the-air updates again," CopperheadOS tweeted Saturday, "to avoid impacting our remaining customers on Nexus devices and other legitimate users. However, downloads on the site will no longer be available and we'll be making changes to the update client for Nexus devices."
In an earlier series of tweets, they explained it's an ongoing issue. "It's not okay to disrespect our non-commercial licensing terms for those official builds by flashing and selling it on hundreds of phones... This is why we've been unable to sell access to Pixel images. There are people that are going to buy those and flash + sell devices in direct competition with us in violation of the licensing terms. Needing to deal with so many people acting in bad faith makes this difficult.
"It's not permitted for our official Nexus builds and yet that's what's happening. We do all of the development, testing, release engineering and we provide the infrastructure, and then competitors sell far more devices than us in violation of our licensing terms. Ridiculous."
If you look at their github account they've dropped their license into clones of Google's Android repositories. Even if you're adding commits you don't get to re-license the code.
Maybe a poison pill update can be sent out that senses the illegal phones and bricks them? Or at least wipes the OS.
Open Source does not mean free! I am tired of seeing this misunderstanding. It means what it says, Open Source! the SOURCE is OPEN.
written by others, adapted by themselves, and now they are whining that someone else does the same with their variant? Another company that does not understand that there is no right to have paying customers.
After these tricks and their anouncement I would not trust their software anymore. Who knows what malware thei are going to distribute to anyone they might think uses their software from other channels?
It means what it says, Open Source! the SOURCE is OPEN.
That sounds great in theory, but in practice it means that anyone can build their own binaries, so why should they pay you?
Plenty of people (including me) make money writing FOSS, but few of us do it by "selling the software", and those that do don't earn much.
This is FUD. If CopperheadOS prohibits selling it commercially, then they are not using an open-source license. By definition, open-source licenses cannot prevent others from selling the software commercially or otherwise prohibit redistribution or discriminate against fields of endeavor (including business use).
And, indeed, most sources (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) call the Copperhead license "source available" rather than "open source" because of these non-open-source restrictions.
See https://opensource.org/osd
1. Free Redistribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
2. 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
And flashing it onto a ROM would constitute a derived work covered under section 3 of the OSD.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Actually that sounds about right. Open source software does not have to be free (as in beer). If you create something that has value and you want to get paid for it, you can choose to charge people money for using it, whether it is open source or not. Some people have no problem with giving away the fruits of their labor, so open source can be a great way to do that, but that does not mean everyone has to do that.
Because some people give away their software, the Pandora's box has been opened. A very vocal group of people seem to think that everything must be free. Hey, who doesn't like free stuff? But to expect everything to be free and to call people evil who want to be rewarded for their hard work is just plain wrong. If someone builds something and tells you that you must pay something for it, then if you turn around and steal it, then you are a thief. You can try and justify it by saying that it should have been free in the first place; that because it was a digital copy that the owner didn't really lose anything; or that they were just asking too much. But it is still stealing.
Now what prevents someone from taking the source and just flashing it that way? Otherwise, it's just shades of Sveasoft with slightly different licensing.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Open Source doesn't allow "no commercial use" terms.
Bruce Perens.
CopperheadOS use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license as their compilation copyright. This is not an Open Source license, thus CopperheadOS is not Open Source.
Bruce Perens.
CopperheadOS uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license as its compilation copyright and as the copyright on their new work. That isn't an Open Source license. It violates rule #6 of the Open Source Definition.
Commercial use is obviously a field of endeavor.
Bruce Perens.
You can put your configuration under a compilation copyright. It can be argued, however, that most of what they do to enhance security is functional, and thus not subject to copyright under 17 USC 102(b). The copyrighted matter in your program is the artistic choices you make when you have more than one way of doing things. Not every line of your code. Not function definitions and returns, data structures, and anything required for compatibility with something else. Read up on CAI v. Altai to get more of an idea of how this works.
Bruce Perens.
then if you turn around and steal it, then you are a thief.
Yes, the people who wrote CopperheadOS are thieves. The security layer of Android is at the Linux level.
The people who wrote CopperheadOS are free to charge whatever they want for their modifications, but they are not allowed to retroactively change the open source license of Linux by dictating that their code can only be used non-commercially.
there immature devs rip off someone else work in this case android then hide it behind a paywall and think the rules dont apply to them. the issue is most company's dont bother to knock them off there cloud of stupid.
Not if it is against the license - you could have access to the source code but have a license that prohibits redestribution. Or a license that prohibits use without paying for it.
Open Source means that you can download the source code for your own use, it does not mean that it conforms to the OSI's vision of what Open Source should mean if they were allowed to trademark it — which they aren't, because it already had a meaning when the OSI became a thing, and it already had a meaning when Bruce &co claim to have invented it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sorry, if Copperhead is an OS based on Linux, then Copperhead must be GPL
No that's not correct. Android is an OS based on Linux and it is not GPL. The kernel is GPL but the rest of the OS is under various other licenses including Apache. The Linux kernel COPYING file explicitly states that programs that use the kernel via normal system calls do not constitute derived works under the GPL.