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Comment by THE_PUN_STOPS | Hacker News Reader

Woah, Xiaomi is behind MIUI? I had no idea. I'm impressed, it's refreshing to see Chinese tech companies pushing innovation and quality to compete instead of half-assed clones.

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It should be noted that MIUI is also a rampant GPL violator. They have taken a lot of open source stuff under the GPL, among other licenses, and closed it off or even claimed as their own. This probably isn't shocking given the article.

http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/11/android-community-demand...

"A lot" and "rampant" seem like exaggerations. Based on that link, most of MIUI's changes are to the Android source code, which licensed under the permissive Apache license.

Only their modifications to the linux kernel need to comply with the GPL license.

edit: Here is the relevant quote from the parent's link

>While the kernel modifications [to the GPL licensed Linux kernel] are only a small part of the modifications Xioami has done to create MIUI, it does include the low-level work Xioami has done to push things like performance and energy efficiency.

If you were to look hard enough, you'd see that you can find plenty of MIUI source code for kernels, patches, etc... Most of the documentation is in Chinese, and the websites aren't in English either, but they seem to comply with their GPL requirements.

They also aren't obligated to release the source for all the Android modifications (Apache licensed).

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