The word itself should have made it clear but we still didn't listen. The lax licensing of Android to Apache-2.0 should have given us a hint, but we still chose to ignore it. Of course, not everyone ignored it, there were people like Richard Stallman who kept talking about it and warned us about it back in 2011:
Linux aside, the software of Android versions 1 and 2 was mostly developed by Google; Google released it under the Apache 2.0 license, which is a lax free software license without copyleft.
But obviously, we conveniently chose to ignore Stallman's warning. We were far too happy and busy with our partially “open source“ gizmos and apps to worry about how our freedoms and privacy were going to crushed by some freedom unfriendly software licensing in the years to come.
Today's smartphone market is a disorganized oligopoly larely controlled by Google who owns the Android platform and a few other players like Samsung and Oppo. These players have no incentive to make their systems open source even though their upstream AOSP code is in fact open source and Apache licensed.
How exactly is Android ”Open” source then? If anything, its a perfect example of the classic case of deception where the opponent's self-created trojan horse itself is used against the opponent to destroy him! Open source has become a swear word in a sense for many, especially those who have lived through the time of true openness and free culture. Only they know what is truly open and the subtle differences between the words open, free and libre which are often confused by many in the software world.
And then there is the tendency to club everything into one and call it FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). But no free software enthusiast worth his salt would like to see his movement corrupted by anything that has to do with open source, and that is for good reasons! Android wasn't the first betrayal in the name of ”open source”, there was the case of freeBSD project too who's code Apple took over without even crediting the source, thus taking advantage of their lax licensing.
Even today, we continue to see the exploitation in the name of open source in case of projects like android. If only android was made under GPL, every vendor like Samsung, Lenovo, etc. would have had to make their code open too and that would have sped up innovation in the mobile apps field by a decade! But that didn't happen and today we are stuck with this fragmented and clumsy ecosystem called android which markets itself as ”open source” without really having anything to do with the spirit of open source.
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