Nearly everybody knows that Android is built on top of a Linux kernel, so that should mean that it is good old-fashioned open-source software, right? Actually, that’s not the case. Since Linux is released under the GNU Public license, Google is forced to release the source code for the Linux kernel that Android runs on. While many other software components on the phone are licenced under the Apache 2.0 license which allows the software to be distributed freely, this license does not necessarily require that the source code be released. To make matters worse, Google has allowed many vendors to introduce their own completely closed source binary drivers and libraries into the operating system. This means that the user community is unable to modify and redistribute their own working firmware.
