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Quick note to OEMS: don’t violate the GPL – it’s serious business. A group of Samsung Indulge owners headed up by popular developer k0nane have been looking for proper kernel source code for their devices since it’s launched. Without it, custom kernels, recoveries and ROMs are out of the question and they’re left with little more than a paper weight.
Samsung actually did make available the the source code, but it was rather incomplete and developers were unable to compile it without errors, making the downloadable source useless for anyone hoping to use it. Samsung supposedly fixed the issues and uploaded an updated source package, but some underlying oversights that the community still can’t crack is keeping it from being a usable kernel.
K0nane tried to alert Samsung to the issue as far back as June 22nd. Samsung asked him to send over his notes about the broken package so that his “HQ team” could take a look. He did so, but Samsung has yet to respond to him about it. We don’t know if they’ve even looked at it, let alone made any progress on it.
They’re fed up, though, and have launched a campaign to get Samsung to comply with the rules of the GNU Public License (GPL). More technical details can be had here, but do your fellow Androids a favor and send this post and the AndroidForums.com thread to license-violation [at] gnu [dot] org. This will help alert GNU and get them to light a fire under Samsung’s butt to comply.
Samsung has been great when it comes to the development community before and they have yet to purposely violate the GPL with other phones so we can’t rightfully accuse them of mal-intent without giving them a chance. Still, let’s hope they realize how messed up this source situation is and work to provide a fix in the near future. This campaign will also hopefully prevent this from happening to other handsets in the future. [AndroidForums.com]
What’s the point of this post? Is there’s anything in the GPL that says when Samsung, I hate them for the record, has to release the source code or that they have to do so all at once when they do?
Yes, that’s exactly what the GPL says. As soon as any code using the GPL is distributed (i.e. as soon as the device is sent to anyone outside of Samsung), the source must be made available.
Still waiting on the contest you guys talked about last Friday????
Come on, Samsung. Don’t ruin your recently earned good will of your fans!
I’d also give Samsung the benefit of the doubt, as they have been really good in the past with source and they have accidently released the wrong or messed up source in an effort to get the source out timely fashion (IE. the Acclaim).
Hi folks – k0nane here. Couple of things to note: first, I didn’t first try on June 22 – June 22 is when Samsung stopped responding! My first major push began back on June 11-12. The source has been broken – confirmed broken, at that – since the release of the device. Second, we’re not trying to accuse them of malicious behavior – as my post notes, we have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing. The only thing we can confirm, based on the evidence available, is extremely poor communication.
If anyone would like to join myself and my fellow Indulge developers, we can be found at irc.fossnet.info #indulge. I am on Twitter @k0nane/@publik0.