▲ | evanjrowley 4 days ago | |
Links 3 through 6 in my comment touched upon this. My point is that even companies behind commercial Linux products are trying to resist the GPL. In 2021, it appeared that Google was planning a pivot to their own BSD/MIT-licensed OS named Fuscia. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smar... This pivot seemed to end around the same time tech layoffs were occuring in 2024. https://9to5google.com/2024/01/15/google-is-no-longer-bringi... Since then, Google has chosen to limit the amount of open source development done for the Android OS. https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-... Keeping Android kernel development internal creates greater risk of binary blobs polluting the source code. Binary blobs might be a practical solution to bring products to market, but they are also a mechanism to circumvent the GPL. I doubt Google will take this problem seriously, but other Linux distributions have. https://lwn.net/Articles/655519/ The move by Google mirrors the choice by Red Hat to keep RHEL source code private. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/ The common trend is product managers for these companies view the GPL as a bug instead of a feature. |