> Just a small comment to say that Android is not the only one (but
> certainly the most visible, and thus easiest to bash on) not making
> effort to get their stuff in mainline.
It's not only that. But Android in general is also a very poor citizen
w.r.t Free Software since it tends to be distributed in closed form for
devices that only work if you add proprietary code, and it supports
DRM-style nightmares.
It's not as dangerous to Free Software as the iphone, tho.
> OpenWRT people are also maintaining their fork of the kernel, without
> even using git, and not contributing much to mainline (I'm certainly
> mistaken on that last comment).
I can assure you that the contributions are as frequent, important, and
significant as the OpenWRT can muster: they have very limited resources,
which is the main limitation. But also because of those limited
resources, it's in their best interest to get things upstream.
Android is different since the company behind it made a conscious
decision to fork even though they have/had the resources necessary to
push their changes upstream.
Stefan
On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Stefan Monnier
<[email protected]> wrote:
>> Just a small comment to say that Android is not the only one (but
>> certainly the most visible, and thus easiest to bash on) not making
>> effort to get their stuff in mainline.
>
> It's not only that. But Android in general is also a very poor citizen
> w.r.t Free Software since it tends to be distributed in closed form for
> devices that only work if you add proprietary code, and it supports
> DRM-style nightmares.
We release the userspace and kernel work we do under Apache2/BSD/MIT
and GPLv2 respectively.
We have always insisted on only GPLv2 code for kernel drivers, and
have never supported binary loadable kernel drivers.
We typically have to deal with some proprietary userspace libraries
(opengl es 2 libraries are a typical example), though we've been
working to reduce the number from release to release. This is an
artifact of the current SoC offerings more than any policy we have --
we much prefer entirely open solutions and actively pursue them
whenever possible.
I'm not sure what DRM-style nightmares we're talking about -- last I
looked, the stock Android platform doesn't have any DRM support of any
sort built-in.
We certainly can't demand that every OEM work this way, but so it goes.
> It's not as dangerous to Free Software as the iphone, tho.
Whew!
>> OpenWRT people are also maintaining their fork of the kernel, without
>> even using git, and not contributing much to mainline (I'm certainly
>> mistaken on that last comment).
>
> I can assure you that the contributions are as frequent, important, and
> significant as the OpenWRT can muster: they have very limited resources,
> which is the main limitation. But also because of those limited
> resources, it's in their best interest to get things upstream.
>
> Android is different since the company behind it made a conscious
> decision to fork even though they have/had the resources necessary to
> push their changes upstream.
I view it more as we made a decision to ship (and enable others to
ship) successful products as priority one, while still making the
source available (as is required, or in some cases not required).
I am always intrigued that everyone is an expert in our resource
availability. Apparently my team has a bunch of engineers loafing
around when they could be contributing patches upstream! Or, maybe,
we're also a very busy bunch of people supporting multiple SoCs,
multiple hardware platforms, multiple releases, who also send code
upstream from time to time, but clearly not as much or as often as
people would like (including ourselves).
Brian
> We have always insisted on only GPLv2 code for kernel drivers, and
> have never supported binary loadable kernel drivers.
<snip>
> I view it more as we made a decision to ship (and enable others to
> ship) successful products as priority one, while still making the
> source available (as is required, or in some cases not required).
>
> Brian
Hi Brian,
can you get some patches upstream ? And with Google behind you, make
it open source ?
And make ARM A9 Mali video docs available for everyone ?