alt Hacker News[flagged]
Replies
Yeah, its the "well, legally, we have to provide the source code, but we make it as painful and slow for you as we can without it becoming a blatant violation of the GPL."
And you have to fill out a Google Form to get that link in the first place.
> I just want to get rid of forms. Like, I never want to fill out a form again.
The opening line from this interview with Sameer Samat on the Google for Developers YouTube channel in June.
At this point, without Git commit history (assuming it is a bare code dump), is it still even possible to guarantee it is what Google says it is?
> Prior to moving it to Google Drive, they started squashing the history into a single commit prior to pushing release tags. The tarballs provided via Google Drive have exactly the same source code. However, they went out of the way to make it more inconvenient in several ways.
Ugh.
Also I can't believe it's been 10 years since they shut down Google Code.
> ...after making a request through Google Forms This is even more ridiculous to me.
> Google, this small tech company (correct me if I'm wrong), is peddling source code via tarballs on google drive.
What is the context for this? It's not clear from the linked social media post.
The Android kernel source code is in git: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/
Plus there's a lot of other Android source hosted on Google's git servers: https://android.googlesource.com/
Don't be evil, right?
This is how a multibillion company that benefited infinitely from open source pays back.
Google hasn't been able to properly do / fix Android gesture navigation for more than half a decade now. The amount that edge swipes in things like photo editing apps are detected as backswipes (sometimes destroying 10+ minutes of editing) is laughable.
Technically this is because a lot of apps thumb their nose at the requirement to have safe areas around swipeable elements in their app, but as a user, that is not my problem to fix. It's Google's.
The workaround is so ridiculously easy too: only allow backswipes to count in the lowest 15% of the bottom left of the screen. Yet despite having hundreds of engineers earning ±350.000 per year work on this problem for years, they haven't been able to either implement or even think of it.
The real fix would be to deprecate the three button layout in Android 18 and remove it in Android 19. Force apps to comply.
Person A: Did you know Google removed access to Pixel code repo.
Person B: Well, it didn't go away, they just changed the access method to Google Drive.
Saved us that conversation here, Thanks. No matter what mental gymnastics we may do, it is pretty clear where this is heading.
On a different note, the source download form requires you to accept Google's privacy policy for the information you submit.
Is it ok to tack on accepting additional policies as requirements to access what is allowed under OSS licenses.
3 years, checks out. Probably buddy buddy with someone. Reminds me of that 3rd Google Pay they made that they had to sack because it was so dumb.
What's Google got to do with GrapheneOS?
There is a little bit of clumsiness in the way Google communicates with the public. What they really mean to say is: we need to be broken up.