So the problem is not the GPL but CLAs. Which is not inconsistent with what Matt said: if you use a CLA to prevent X from doing Y you are not understanding open source.
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I consider the license incompatibilities to be a serious problem. I fully understand why they forbid having an immutable root of trust due to their goals, but that's also a problem from my perspective.
I have a problem with copyright assignment too, but not only with the GPL.
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I'm totally fine with cla.developers.google.com/about/google-i. Their CLA is essentially just an explicit Apache 2 license without the requirement to include it with the software. I wouldn't be fine with it if they used GPL rather than Apache 2, because I expect the same terms from them.
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I simply don't believe in copyright and consider any restrictive licenses to be non-free. It doesn't matter if the goal is preserving freedoms.
My personal experiences with copyright have made me believe quite strongly that the entire thing is a mistake primarily used abusively.
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It depends on using the legal system against people. If you don't have willpower or resources to do that, it doesn't do any good. It can and does get violated. It only restricts people who respect the rules.
If pirating a movie isn't unethical, then neither is violating the GPL.
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Would you spend 2 years and $100k on a lawsuit because a company infringed upon your GPL licensed code? I don't think there's really much motivation to do it aside from squashing competition. Chances are, they didn't produce any valuable code to integrate into the project anyway.
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Well, that's how DD-WRT started. Of course there's also people like McHardy, granted.
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I would much rather have hardware from vendors truly believing in open source and fully supporting it. I'm not entirely convinced that companies reluctantly doing code dumps is a good thing. It doesn't really work with GPLv2 unless they don't make secure devices anyway.
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Even if the Linux kernel was GPLv3, companies could still happily implement most of the board support, drivers, etc. as closed source code in userspace.
They also have no obligation to keep updating firmware, which is important, and even if it was open it's likely signed code.
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In the smartphone world, if a company doesn't care about supporting alternate OSes they won't support unlocking. Most supporting it do poor quality code dumps difficult to turn into a production quality OS.
Most don't let you use hardware security features, camera features, etc.
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I want more cooperation with hardware vendors, not coercing them into doing the bare minimum. I want more devices like Pixels where you can install an alternate OS and have full support. Warranty not void and all security features like verified boot, secure element, etc. working.