Tech lawyer again claims Google violating GPL

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 17 August 2011 12:29

Opinion and Analysis

In March this year, a lawyer working for the firm Brown Rudnick wrote a speculative article, claiming that Google may be violating the GNU General Public Licence in its Android operating system.

Edward Naughton is back again, this time speculating that Google has indeed violated the GPL,  and hence the company (and all others who use Android) should not be allowed to distribute the operating system.

His writing is full of suppositions, and hypotheticals. If he indeed did have concrete knowledge of a GPL violation he could have easily taken it to either the Software Freedom Law Centre or the Software Freedom Conservancy and sought to have it resolved.

That, however, does not appear to be Naughton's intention in making these claims. It is all smoke and mirrors, the sort of stuff that is generally aimed at raising doubt in the minds of the ignorant and half-educated. And as we all know, when it comes to the GPL, there are plenty of that type around.

On his first attempt, Naughton said that a key component of Android, the Bionic library which is used to access the core features of the Linux kernel code, was developed by Google stripping the kernel headers and then declaring those files free of the copyright restrictions placed on it by the GPL.

But this argument was shot down by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who, in a statement to ITWorld's Brian Proffitt, said that the claim seemed totally bogus.

"We've always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too," Torvalds was quoted as saying.

"The kernel headers contain various definitions for the interfaces to user space, and we even actively try to make sure that the headers can be used by user space (and try to mark which of the headers are expected to be usable in such a way). Exactly because we know user space needs those details in order to interact with the kernel."

Naughton's claim was also countered by free software activist Bradley Kuhn who told iTWire at the time that the claim was a speculative hypothesis that needed more study before it could be taken seriously.