It sends a positive signal to a group of people who really don't matter - the very small minority of users who like open source and aren't already placated by AOSP existing - but a negative one to people who do - their vendors.

Fuschia is designed so that driver sources don't need to be available, and we can still upgrade the kernel. This is better than doing exactly the same thing as before which didn't work. It solves a practical problem (being unable to upgrade your phone's OS) through technology rather than licensing.

Let me restate that: "GPLing Fuschia sends a negative signal to vendors that don't want to release the source for their drivers."

That is fine. Any hardware that is released should come with full source code for its drivers. Vendors that are unwilling to comply, should not be releasing hardware. Since it would be infeasible and restrictive to legally enforce, we can just forbid them to use our popular open source kernels instead.

Please, consider the alternative world you want us to regress to! The present reality is practically utopian, compared to a world where the majority of drivers are proprietary! You want desktop/laptop/server computers to have the same awful, unfixable drivers as Android!? Fuschia will not magically make vendor code any less crap!

And, the "practical problem" here is created by licensing. You said it yourself:

>Fuschia is designed so that driver sources don't need to be available, and we can still upgrade the kernel.

This is a problem of licensing. If we were actually talking about purely technical solutions to purely technical problems, this problem wouldn't even exist. We would never have this bizarre problem of unreproducible binary artifacts sitting on our hardware without the ability to rebuild them.

Here is a thought: Maybe if Google started (threatening to) enforce the GPL against vendors, this would be fixed. Sure, it would also destroy their business relationships. But it would actually fix this security problem, today, immediately.

>That is fine. Any hardware that is released should come with full source code for its drivers. Vendors that are unwilling to comply, should not be releasing hardware.

Fine for you. Not fine for the vendors (or Google).

>Please, consider the alternative world you want us to regress to! The present reality is practically utopian, compared to a world where the majority of drivers are proprietary! You want desktop/laptop/server computers to have the same awful, unfixable drivers as Android!?

It worked very well for Windows and OS X, so?

I'd rather have proprietary drivers than no drivers because few vendors are willing to make them open source.

In fact, I'd rather have proprietary drivers than community made, reverse engineered ones too.

If we could have open source vendor provided drivers of course that could be ideal. But in reality we would just have less drivers.

>Here is a thought: Maybe if Google started (threatening to) enforce the GPL against vendors, this would be fixed. Sure, it would also destroy their business relationships. But it would actually fix this security problem, today, immediately.

This is naive and you know it. In reality, what would happen is 3-4 years from now, once the lawsuit has run its course, maybe vendors would need to publicize their binary sources, but given that much time they might just develop in house solutions.

So let me get this straight: your proposed alternative to Android is just... not having Android at all?

"- If the GPL is ineffective, it can't possibly hurt and at the very least it sends a positive signal. So why not use it?"

1. Of course it can hurt. that's just silly to say. 2. As for why not use it? Because it's ineffective? You answered your own question?

This seems like a pretty basic GPL zealot argument at this point ("It's completely ineffective but you should do it anyway!") , and i'm pretty uninterested in continuing such arguments.

How, exactly, would it hurt? Perhaps by... discouraging use from companies that want to keep their changes private? I am completely fine with that. Proprietary code should not be allowed anywhere near the kernel or hardware support. Would it hurt in any other way?

As a concluding remark, I'll just repost what I posted elsewhere in this thread:

>Consider what happens if you're wrong. What happens if the GPL actually is the reason why Linux has such wide open-source hardware support? Then say goodbye to hacking on Fuschia on your own hardware...

>I'm not willing to take that risk.

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!"

Linux does not have wide open-source hardware support on mobile phones, so that argument simply doesn't work in this space - you're arguing in favour of a supposed status quo that doesn't actually exist in the first place.

>How, exactly, would it hurt? Perhaps by... discouraging use from companies that want to keep their changes private?

Yes. That would hurt, because as a user I am very much interested in the products of those companies.

And Google wants them as an OS vendor too.

>I am completely fine with that.

Well, the vendors and Google are not. And neither would I be.

Proprietary code should not be allowed anywhere near the kernel or hardware support.

So that only second tier vendors bother applying?

Your forgetting an important one. The default is a bsd-3 like license. Google prefers to release everything under that single license unless there are strongly compelling reasons to do otherwise, and "it can't hurt", even if it we're true, is not strongly compelling.