Android Licensing Issues Could Affect Developers

Licensing issues might be important for developers, not just Google and other Android-licensing manufacturers, says Peter Vescuso of Black Duck Software. While Android is offered under the Apache and GPL open source licences, Android also has components referencing a total of 19 such licences.

Black Duck identified 3,800 new open source mobile projects launched in 2010 alone, and 55 percent of them were based on Android.

Even single projects used within Android, like Bionic or WebKit, can have more than a dozen licences attached to them, some of which may not be certified by the Open Source Initiative, said Vescuso. The obligations in these licences apply to device makers and independent developers, not just Google, he says.

Some developers violate their licenses when they make a change to Android and do not, for whatever reason, share those changes with the rest of the community.

Android licensing is tricky