Android is licensing minefield, says open source expert
Developers may be subject to as many as 19 different open source licences with different obligations
Published: 22 August, 2011
It is not just the big OEMs which have to worry about the legal and IPR implications of Android. According to an open source licensing expert speaking at last week's LinuxCon event, there may be a nightmare waiting to happen for all kinds of Android developers.
Peter Vescuso of Black Duck Software said that, while Android is offered under the Apache and GPL open source licences, the OS has components referencing a total of 19 such licences. Even single projects used within Android, like Bionic or WebKit, can have more than a dozen licences attached to them, some of which may not be certified by the Open Source Initiative, said Vescuso, as reported by NetworkWorld. The obligations in these licences apply to device makers and independent developers, not just Google.
"The issue with open source software is technical decisions have compliance and legal obligations that you need to be aware of," Vescuso said. This highlights what the legal battles over Android have already made clear - that compliance and licensing issues in open source are often more complex than in controlled environments, despite Google's promotion of Android as being cheap, open and simple, compared to a platform like WP7.
Examples cited in the presentation included the apparently well known open source condition that, if anyone modifies the licensed code, they must make those changes available to the whole community. Many are ignoring this, deliberately or through negligence, argued the speaker - and some, of course, claim Google plays hard and fast with open source rules itself, by releasing its own code enhancements on a selective basis, most notoriously with the staggered sharing of Honeycomb.
"My sense is many of the lawsuits in the open source community have been around the most basic compliance," Vescuso said. "You change the code, and don't make the sourcecode available."
The Linux Foundation is trying to ease the pain by creating a new specification for tracking licence compliance.
Black Duck identified 3,800 new open source mobile projects launched in 2010 alone, and 55% of them targeted Android. However, 39% of new open source projects are for iOS, which although it contains many open source components, is not open source itself. Apple represents a complicated platform for such hybrid developers - GPL-licensed software cannot be distributed via the App Store, because the GPL bars additional obligations being placed on software, such as Apple's terms of service within its store.
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