Android License Transparency, It’s Your Right

Posted by lordpenguin on Aug 20, 2012 9:47 PM EDT
The Powerbase; By Tom Nardi
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Karl Fogel, board member of the Open Source Initiative and QuestionCopyright staffer, recently posted a “modest proposal” on his personal blog. Karl suggests that mobile application marketplaces, most notably on Android, should make it obvious what license an application is released under before the user installs it.

Everyone knows that Android is an open source operating system, but many don’t realize that the actual applications that run on top of Android are often anything but. In fact, most of Google’s own applications for Android (such as Google Music and GMail) are not open source at all. Look through the most popular applications on the Google Play Store, you may discover you’re hard pressed to find a reference to what license they are released under, let alone their source.

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