“In violation of GPL” is a stretch.

Can’t imagine Google is making the process of obtaining source code easier on themselves though.

Android has always been more source-open than “open source”. The vast majority of community contributions that make it into the codebase are security fixes and small bug fixes.

Everything else is essentially all the work of Google and (to some extent) Samsung.

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jraph 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Open source doesn't imply open to contributions. And you could imagine source available software that's not open source but takes contributions (and this is not theoretical, I've seen this in the wild).

(However, that's quite orthogonal to being a dick about making the source code that you must share available)

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jsiepkes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Everything else is essentially all the work of Google and (to some extent) Samsung.

There is plenty in Android which isn't the work of Google. For starters the Kotlin implementation and the Java implementation (OpenJDK).

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ajross 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> “In violation of GPL” is a stretch.

The originally envisioned distribution method, in fact, was "Send FSF a blank 9-track tape and they'll fill it and mail it back". Nor, obviously, does anything prevent someone who downloads this from Drive from mirroring it on GitHub or wherever.

This is arguably bad stewardship of a historically open source project. It's certainly not a license violation.

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Brian_K_White 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's paying a bill in pennies.

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ajross an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not even that. Downstream projects host their own mirrors already, this is an annoying hoop to jump through for the maintainers (basically suck down a bunch of tarballs for every release, analogous to grabbing stuff from FTP sites back in the day), but not exactly a terrible hardship compared to the really very significant work of maintaining a large project.

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simoncion 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

There might be some merit to a claim that Google Drive isn't a medium customarily used for software distribution these days, but, yeah, it's definitely not paying a thousand+ cent bill in pennies, and I'm skeptical that it's a violation of the letter of the GPL.

It is definitely a dick move by Google.

	▲	leni536 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		While I don't find any requirements on how timely the source distribution must be upon request, one can reasonably say that there must be a line between 1 nanosecond and 1 century.
	▲	jraph 20 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> There might be some merit to a claim that Google Drive isn't a medium customarily used for software distribution these days I suppose forcing a means to share the source code could have been too restrictive, but the GPL only speaks about the shape of the source code itself (it should be "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it"), not how it is shared, so indeed, not a violation of the letter of the GPL I think. It's like what we had in France and the Hadopi, which requested ISPs to share the IP addresses of people torrenting a defined set of files. One of them sent them printed on paper... (But the malicious compliance was cool in this case).