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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

And the GPL will make it really hard for Oracle to prevent Google from using it in Android.

But doesn't Google tries to avoid GPL?

I think they're pretty anti-GPL with Android, and have some rules against inclusion of GPLed components there, besides the kernel. I think the whole userspace is under non-copyleftish BSD/MIT/etc.

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> But doesn't Google tries to avoid GPL?

No.

> I think they're pretty anti-GPL with Android, and have some rules against inclusion of GPLed components there, besides the kernel.

OEMs don't want their hardware support to be GPL-encumbered. See https://source.android.com/source/licenses.html

That's picking some major nits: whatever you want to claim is Google's internal mental opinion of GPL, the reality is they are building Android to cater to hardware manufactures, and those hardware manufactures do not want GPL, so Google has actively avoided GPL code in Android, often going to extreme lengths to build half-asses reimplementations of things that have perfectly stable GPL implementations so they don't have to rely on code using that license.

The JDK stays inside the development environment. The development toolchain translates Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode. There are probably a few other GPL components in the toolchain, although they are transitioning away from GCC in the NDK.

also, it comes with a patent grant

Useful to some degree, but if I understand correctly, patents are not part of Oracle's suit.

There were, but the jury found non-infringement on both.

Thank you for this.. that was my question, in a different comment. I was curious how using OpenJDK would prevent a similar lawsuit... Also, does this mean that Dalvik will be enhanced to support Java's compiled modules directly, or are they outright replacing Dalvik?

TFA doesn't make much of this all that clear to me. Though I admit I only skimmed it.

Dalvik is already retired and replaced by ART.

Judging from the commits on AOSP, ART is still being worked on and has been adapted to openjdk.

It looks like it is here to stay.

Isn't OpenJDK under the GPLv2, which does not come with a patent grant?

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