• pinball_wizard@lemmy.zipEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    What happens? (If, because again, that’s not what has happened, so far.)

    • GrapheneOS would continue, but probably not manage compatibility with the next Pixel phone.
    • Various forks of Android Open Source get created, with mixed success. Existing phones will keep working, new phones with proprietary servers drivers are much less likely to work.
    • We create something like ndiswrapper to help us extract weird new phone hardware drivers and make them work with open operating systems.
    • The fully open phone hardware projects suddenly get a bunch of new customers.

    The last point is the only thing I’m confident is preventing Google from taking their fork of AOSP fully closed. (Yes, I know it wouldn’t be legal. But I’m not sure their lawyers think they would be held accountable. Most people don’t understand the existing laws Google already breaks daily since purchasing YouTube.)

  • lordnikon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    3 days ago

    Also it’s not going closed source it just doing closed development with pushing the code over the wall at release time.

      • lordnikon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Yep i think they are looking to reduce down stream of releasing features before they do. It’s shitty but it’s not going closed source. They would have to rewrite the whole thing to go close source. They could do that but the version we have is ours they can’t take it away.

  • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
    42·
    3 days ago
    1. They wouldn’t get updates from base, anymore
    2. That’s not what’s happening
    • davidgro@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      3 days ago

      And they aren’t (for now) changing the license of future work either - just not releasing source until the same time they release binaries, which is totally allowed in the open source licenses.

      • Vash63@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        They could close everything except the kernel and maybe a few libraries here and there. The Linux kernel alone does not exactly get you close to having an Android distribution.

  • pathos@lemmy.mlEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    Pretty much nothing, because 99% of what everybody uses is proprietary blobs on top of Android anyway. The Andriod open source is absolute minimum barebones, with MS Paint like UI and basically no UX.

  • MoreZombies@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    I think it would still be a good question to ponder, even though that isn’t what has happened yet.

    What IF Google decided future versions were closed source? How would that not affect our open source alternatives?