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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's as you wrote: they are making the source available, albeit in a very inconvenient way, and because there is no time limit specified, they're complying with the letter of the GPL (although not with its spirit), so you can't even realistically sue them. And the number of people who buy new Pixels to immediately install GrapheneOS on them is (no offense) negligible, so I don't think they'll see a sales impact from it...

Which is not to say that I'm on Google's side, this is absolutely a dick move from them, and they wouldn't have done it 20 or even 10 years ago, but today's Google is definitely no longer the "don't be evil" company.

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> they are making the source available

Not in the preferred form for modification expected by the build system and not in a reasonable amount of time. It's artificially delayed with no legitimate reason.

> And the number of people who buy new Pixels to immediately install GrapheneOS on them is (no offense) negligible

Nearly all of our current users bought a device specifically to install GrapheneOS. Our current userbase is around 500k and many of those are users had one or more earlier devices with GrapheneOS. Our userbase is rapidly growing. Look up how many Pixels are actually sold in a year. It's not negligible at all.

There are also many large companies wanting GrapheneOS devices with official support from the OEM.

Sorry, I stand corrected: Despite owning a Pixel 9 Pro myself, I didn't realize Google's Android phones market share was so tiny (1.1%! according to https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers). In that case, of course, the number of Pixels bought because of GrapheneOS could be a significant fraction.

That’s 1.1% of ~1.1-1.2B Android phones sold per year. I dont’t know how long the average GrapheneOS user holds on to their device, but if 25% of them per year buy a new phone (rather than upcycling a used one or using their previous phone another year), that would amount to about 1% of Google’s annual sales at best.

And just to emphasize, "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" is a direct quote from GPLv3, under which the Linux kernel is licensed.

<https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html>

If GrapheneOS are finding the Google Drive option inadequate, they might choose to invoke Section 6 clause b of the GPL "Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium)".

Note that AOSP as a whole is covered under the Apache 2.0 licence, which permits but does not obligate third-party distribution of source. That is, it's not a "copyleft" licence in the sense of the GPL.

Googles notes on why BSD/MIT/Apache licences are preferred are ... informative.

<https://source.android.com/docs/setup/contribute/licenses>

> so you can't even realistically sue them

Genuinely asking: are you a lawyer?

Sounds to me that going from "it works easily and rapidly" to this deserves a big big fine. That's the only thing they understand.

No, I'm not (a lawyer might recommend to sue, hoping for a big payout, even if the chances of it happening are small?). I looked at the GPL text, and what Google is doing is really pushing the "If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means", but others have done the same or worse, and so far fines that are really painful for a large company are few and far between...

The main thing here is it used to work faster and google surely can deliver data fast - but now they intentionally changed procedure to make it slower. That could be fined for going against the spirit of the licence contract.

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