In light of JBQ's quitting AOSP[1], how open is open enough? Will we be happy if we get "free check" license to use the binary blobs? Will we be happy if we can see the code but not be able to copy it? Do we require them to publish drivers and their source code in a permissive license? Many people will think it is a "shades of gray" issue. I kind of want more convenience than rms promises but on the surface it seems silly to think we can have the freedom and openness from Canonical where a bigger (financially) Google has so miserably failed. Perhaps our interests are more aligned with Canonical than with Google? Thoughts?
I've spent some time thinking about this, and for me (and a lot of other people I've talked with) the line in the sand is "enough for us to be able to build newer or versions of the userland and kernel." This does not require that we're able to modify every bit of code.
For instance, the Raspberry Pi has a binary blob of firmware that contains a lot of the code for using with the graphics hardware. While we can't modify or recompile this part, the (minimalistic) interface to this firmware is an open source kernel module. This allows you to build newer or modified kernels, and build other distributions for the RPi and still have access to the graphics acceleration. I consider this "open enough."
While Android is fairly open, there is a large part of it still that is closed source. This includes the front-ends of Google's own services (I consider back ends out of scope), binary drivers (graphics), binary firmware (radio) and binary libraries (OpenGL implementations, closely linked to graphics drivers).
The goal of Canonical's project is also to make the drivers and OpenGL part open source, but I've not seen anything about the radio bits.
In light of JBQ's quitting AOSP[1], how open is open enough? Will we be happy if we get "free check" license to use the binary blobs? Will we be happy if we can see the code but not be able to copy it? Do we require them to publish drivers and their source code in a permissive license? Many people will think it is a "shades of gray" issue. I kind of want more convenience than rms promises but on the surface it seems silly to think we can have the freedom and openness from Canonical where a bigger (financially) Google has so miserably failed. Perhaps our interests are more aligned with Canonical than with Google? Thoughts?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6174514