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How to profile "native code" in Android?

How much GPL licensed code is included in the Apache v2 licensed Google Android?

  • Having now audited the code of some Android source code distributions made available by OEMs, it was interesting to see that they include quite a lot of GPL-licensed code. This obviously does not mean the whole of Android should necessarily be licensed under the GPL, but I'd be interested in hearing what GPL components are known to be included in Android in order to be able to form a view about how controlled the code integration has been.

  • Answer:

    Some notes on how to explore this: 1. Check out Android source -- see http://source.android.com for instructions 2. find . -name MODULE_LICENSE_\* Each module is tagged with an empty file indicating its license type (APACHE2, BSD, GPL, etc). However, while there are a number of GPL or LGPL components in the tree, very few of them actually end up in the device image -- most of the GPL components are used as part of the build process (compilers, tools, etc) or SDK tools. Also, OEMs may choose to include additional GPL components that are not part of the standard Android Open Source Project.

Brian Swetland at Quora Visit the source

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