It’s an Apache license with a contributor agreement. At any point they could close source. People could fork from it at that point, but any new features/updates/breaking changed from then out would be behind the scenes. There’s no GPL poison pill in this one, I’m afraid.
Note: I don’t at all expect this extreme of a direction.
For as long as it’s still under the Apache licence, they’re still obligated to release the source under the terms of that licence. They’d need to change the licence to stop providing code; which as you say, they could do, but that would also kill AOSP entirely overnight so is a bit of a bigger problem than the one described in the OP.
Exactly. I don’t think they’d ever go down this road, but the big players like Samsung have agreements in place where they will continue to get access to main or some trunk. No reason they couldn’t change license and require all players to do the same thing, though O doubt that would happen given the massive security PR implications. So many Android devices would end up with vulnerabilities, tarnishing the image.
There’s also just no real incentive for them to do it. The number of devices running fully de-googled Android forks are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Everyone running devices with non-standard Android but which still uses Google Play Services and the rest are just as valuable to Google as the ones running stock. And it suits Google to have the small ultra-privacy hobbyist market still running Android forks, even de-googled ones, rather than moving on to something else entirely.
It’s an Apache license with a contributor agreement. At any point they could close source. People could fork from it at that point, but any new features/updates/breaking changed from then out would be behind the scenes. There’s no GPL poison pill in this one, I’m afraid.
Note: I don’t at all expect this extreme of a direction.
For as long as it’s still under the Apache licence, they’re still obligated to release the source under the terms of that licence. They’d need to change the licence to stop providing code; which as you say, they could do, but that would also kill AOSP entirely overnight so is a bit of a bigger problem than the one described in the OP.
Exactly. I don’t think they’d ever go down this road, but the big players like Samsung have agreements in place where they will continue to get access to
mainor some trunk. No reason they couldn’t change license and require all players to do the same thing, though O doubt that would happen given the massive security PR implications. So many Android devices would end up with vulnerabilities, tarnishing the image.There’s also just no real incentive for them to do it. The number of devices running fully de-googled Android forks are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Everyone running devices with non-standard Android but which still uses Google Play Services and the rest are just as valuable to Google as the ones running stock. And it suits Google to have the small ultra-privacy hobbyist market still running Android forks, even de-googled ones, rather than moving on to something else entirely.