BeastDroid: The Sexiest Android Yet!

Dear World,

The OSS operating system universe is dominated by Linux. I personally love Linux — for it’s rock solid reliability and market momentum that causes, NAY forces new software to be written for/on it first. Prime examples include the best-in-class flash filesystem F2FS and the Android OS, both of which are exclusive to Linux!

But, Linux is burdened by the viral-ity and inflexibility of its license. There is no happenstance in the adoption of permissive licenses by some of the most popular and innovative software in recent history (Android-ApacheLicense, Hadoop-ApacheLicense, ….). Analyzing github repos of Google and Facebook reveals an overwhelming preference for permissive licenses.

The choice of Linux for Android’s kernel comes as a BIG surprise to many. If Google already allocated a significant budget for R&D and marketing into a mobile platform, why start off with a GPL-ed kernel, and re-engineer glibc just to protect the stack sitting over it from GPL pollution? Why not use FreeBSD, and have the cake and eat it too? I can only guess that a Linux aficionado with authority overrode saner recommendations, and chose Linux anyways only to hit a roadblock with Google’s lawyers and OHA members seeking protection for their IP. At which point, voila, the Android stack moved to an Apache license, with Bionic being written from scratch for the sole purpose of protecting Android and user apps from the kernel’s GPL license. Bionic, my dear world, only exists as a workaround for the GPL.

But why not switch the kernel to FreeBSD? Because Google’s business is not in hardware sales but advertising, which ends up being a raw deal for the chip vendors and phone manufacturers.

Let’s examine the advantages of Android on a permissive kernel:

1> Companies that build the ICs/hardware know the best way to extract every last bit of performance from it. Case in point: NVidia proprietary driver performance v.s. the open source community driver

2> GPL serves very large companies very well, and as counter-intuitive as it sounds, encourages monopolies. No wonder companies with a business model of selling advertisements exploit GPL to systemically commoditize the hardware that delivers the ads (Android phones, Chromebooks, etc.). For hardware/systems companies, GPL stymies innovation and differentiation, unless IP is moved INTO the hardware/firmware, which artificially increases costs. The FreeBSD project has gone on record saying “GPL is well suited for use as a marketing weapon, potentially reducing overall economic benefit and contributing to monopolistic behavior. GPL presents a real problem for those wishing to commercialize and profit from software”

3> Extracting the very best in performance from a given piece of hardware translates to greater value to the end user. It could reduce costs by reducing the hardware spec without sacrificing performance, or provide higher performance for the same hardware costs.

So, dear world, let’s make FreeBSD sexy again, by porting Android to it. There are many Linux-isms in the Android stack, but with persistence we can take back the kernel and deliver an Android that runs faster, smoother, better AND cheaper. Let us provide hardware vendors a platform to innovate on the OS-systems layer without the GPL jingoists hijacking their IP!!

Cheers!