GPL-enforcement expert Bradley Kuhn says that Android’s C library is most likely not violating the GPL as far as Linux is concerned, or at least that no sufficient proof has been shown to support this claim:

In short, the question is: Does Bionic (the Android/Linux default C library developed by Google) violate the GPL by importing “scrubbed” headers from Linux? For those of you seeking TL;DR version: You can stop now if you expect me to answer this question; I’m not going to. I’m just going to show that the apparent original analysis material that started this brouhaha is a speculative hypothesis which would require much more research to amount to anything of note. Indeed, the kind of work needed to answer these questions typically requires the painstaking work of a talented developer working very closely with legal counsel.

I’m quite sure no one — including hard-core copyleft advocates like me — expects nor seeks the GPLv2 terms to apply to programs that interface with Linux solely as user-space programs that runs on an operating system that uses Linux as its kernel. Thus, I’d guess that even if it turned out that Google made some mistakes in this regard for Bionic, we’d all work together to rectify those mistakes so that the outcome everyone intended could occur. Moreover, to compare the specifics of this situation to other types of so-called “copyleft circumvention techniques” is just link-baiting that borders on trolling. Google wasn’t seeking to circumvent the GPL at all; they were seeking to write and/or adapt a permissively licensed library that replaced an LGPL’d one. I’m of course against that task on principle (I think Google should have just used glibc and/or uClibc and required LGPL-compliance by applications). But, to deny that it’s possible to rewrite a C library for Linux under a license that isn’t GPLv2 would also imply immediately the (incorrect) conclusion that uClibc and glibc are covered by the GPLv2, and we are all quite sure they aren’t; even Naughton himself admits that (regarding glibc). Google may have erred; no one actually knows for sure at this time. But the task they sought to do has been done before and everyone intended it to be permitted. The worst mistake of which we might ultimately accuse Google is inadvertently taking a copyright-infringing short-cut. If someone actually does all the research to prove that Google did so, I’d easily offer a 1,000-to-1 bet to anyone that such a copyright infringement could be cleared up easily, that Bionic would still work as a permissively licensed C library for Linux, and the implications of the whole thing wouldn’t go beyond: “It’s possible to write your own C library for Linux that isn’t covered by the GPLv2” — a fact which we’ve all known for a decade and a half anyway.

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GPL-enforcement expert Bradley Kuhn says that Android's C library is most likely not violating the GPL as far as Linux is concerned, or at least that no sufficient proof has been shown to support this claim: In short, the question is: Does Bionic (the Android/Linux default C ...