Posted by Animux 19 hours ago
But is there any reason that google might have that they feel is legitimate?
For example, delaying releasing source until they've had a chance to update all the pixels with security patches might be good from their perspective, to reduce zero-day exploits for people they are supporting.
Ransomware gangs, etc still get red carpet service.
The motorola / GrapheneOS partnership gives me some hope though. Maybe when the pendulum swings back in 2028, the US will pass consumer protection laws, and we’ll have the right to import devices that allow open ROMs, and demand they be supported by cell networks.
(I doubt the moderate democrats would support this, but I’d guess the DSA candidates could be convinced to.)
Couldn't simply someone mirror these Google Drive folders?
https://gitlab.com/grapheneos/kernel_pixel/-/tree/17-base
https://gitlab.com/grapheneos/kernel_pixel_muzel/-/tree/17-b...
We also have mirrors of the QPR1 Beta and QPR2 Beta code there too.
It's not meant to be distributed as a tarball or a single Git repository. The build system runs Git commands to determine the revisions of each component. It's supposed to be in dozens of Git repositories. They provide repo metadata as part of the tarballs on Google Drive which you can see there but it's not a full replacement for the Git repository layout expected by builds. It's somewhat convenient having it in a monorepo but it's not the way it's meant to be and the build system makes it clear that it isn't happy about it despite running.
It would be nice if Google would simply push it to the Git repositories still available on AOSP again. The repositories still exist both internally and publicly but they're making it a hassle instead of simply pushing tags.
We publicly complained about these and other Pixel changes as they were ongoing and that directly led to our Motorola partnership. It was in Google's financial interest to work with us so we continue using Pixels and that's still the case. They're welcome to reach out to us and start collaborating again. We made a lot of upstream contributions and aren't their enemy.
Google should want more people to use their devices, apps and services. It shows how heavily they're violating antitrust laws by using monopolies to protect other monopolies when they sacrifice revenue for their devices and apps/services for it.
With git tags, presumably people spoke in terms of cryptographic hashes. Now what prevents them from serving different Google drive contents to different accounts?
You and I aren't in those business channels, and we're not being given anything with a hash. There's simply no hash to collide with?
This is the relevant code for Android 17:
https://gitlab.com/grapheneos/kernel_pixel/-/tree/17-base
https://gitlab.com/grapheneos/kernel_pixel_muzel/-/tree/17-b...
There are other branches there with it for Android 17 QPR1 Beta and Android 17 QPR2 Beta.
Google could save everyone including themselves a lot of hassle by simply publishing it to GitHub. If they don't want to push it to AOSP for weird organizational reasons as part of saying AOSP doesn't support Pixels, fine. Taking weeks or more to get back to us isn't reasonable for one the largest tech companies in the world.
It's also questionable whether what they're providing is truly the preferred form for modification considering the build system is quite unhappy about the lack of Git repositories. They had to provide a repo manifest metadata file to work around part of it.
Pixel 9a and earlier were sold as the official Android Open Source Project (AOSP) reference devices. They made a commitment to providing 7 years of updates for the Pixel 8 and later. Android 16 declared Pixels were no longer AOSP reference devices and stopped providing any support for them. From our perspective, Google hasn't fulfilled their update commitment for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 9a. It's fair to say the Pixel 10 and later weren't sold as AOSP reference devices and didn't have any commitment to providing sources as part of the updates, but that isn't the case for the earlier devices.