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A comment on Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support. Parent comment

Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by nobodywasishere on Friday March 26, 2021 @05:37PM (#26597259)
Android should have been GPL
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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by pmlnr on Friday March 26, 2021 @05:39PM (#26597279)
And how would that make any difference when it comes to radio firmware?
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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by herogreen on Friday March 26, 2021 @05:45PM (#26597346)
The radio firmware could be executed on different CPU than the Android kernel and communicate with a standard protocol ?
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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by monocasa on Friday March 26, 2021 @05:50PM (#26597390)
That's more or less what happens already.
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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by teruakohatu on Friday March 26, 2021 @06:53PM (#26597968)
It is but if the radio driver was open source then the interface with the radio SoC would be documented.

Right now it is the worst of both worlds. Closed interface for a closed undocumented chip able to execute arbitrary code.

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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by wyldfire on Friday March 26, 2021 @11:16PM (#26599604)
The interface isn't closed anymore, is it? [1]

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/mhi/mhi.html

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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by UncleMeat on Saturday March 27, 2021 @09:57AM (#26602296)
Drivers don't need to be open source to interact with GPLed code.
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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by cwyers on Friday March 26, 2021 @10:21PM (#26599298)
The part of Android that talks to the Qualcom drivers is the Linux kernel, which is GPL already.
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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by nine_k on Friday March 26, 2021 @11:22PM (#26599633)
You can read the patented algorithm in the patent, and even implement it, but you cannot legally distribute it, until the parent expires.
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Re:Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to lon... by lrem on Saturday March 27, 2021 @04:33AM (#26600884)
Apache License 2.0 is GPL-compatible, isn't it?

Edit: expanding the acronym, to evade Android/Apache confusion.

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