News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Is the GPL Really Declining?. Parent comment

Re:Is the GPL Really Declining? by lorenzhs on Thursday May 04, 2017 @04:19AM (#14263377)
But Android isn't really open. Without the Google Play Services, you can't use half of all apps, or even get push notifications without ruining battery life. Your device likely also uses a bunch of binary firmware blobs without which it wouldn't work. It's pretend-open.

Also, Chrome for Android isn't really open source either, see the FAQ: https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/faq "Chrome for Android is derived from Chromium. Since the launch of the first version, we have steadily open sourced all the critical components. You can build various Chromium components for Android as used in Chrome for Android using the instructions here."

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is the GPL Really Declining? by lorenzhs on Thursday May 04, 2017 @05:04AM (#14263545)
Ah, my bad, I didn't know you could build Chromium for Android. That second link hasn't been updated in over a year, though.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is the GPL Really Declining? by pluma on Thursday May 04, 2017 @04:36AM (#14263454)
I wrote that comment using Chrome (by Google, a company that makes money) on Ubuntu (by Canonical, a company that makes money) so your argument isn't really relevant.

Although to be fair, Google Chrome itself is not open source (although Chromium is). The main reason I'm using Chrome rather than Chromium is that I like the closed source parts too (e.g. the Google-specific integrations).

[ Parent | on HN ]