Basically yes, but that's often not good enough either. Lots of third party code OEMs end up with in their kernels, unmaintainable, and often incompatible with anything.
Well, it's not true that "ARM has no method to enumerate devices". It does have that; it's just that hardware manufacturers are bad at using it properly. (That's not to say it's not a huge problem; it's just that it's an economic/business/social one, not a technical one.)
I mean, it sort of does and sort of doesn't, but the hardware manufacturers just aren't used to thinking about things in the proper way. Just like the hardware is a black box with no user serviceable parts inside, as far as they're concerned the firmware (because that's still how they think of the OS and everything on it) is a single binary blob with no user serviceable parts inside, even if it's actually just linux and Android. And just like all the hardware parts are designed and qualified for a particular design, the same goes for the software: when you buy your hardware you get a software with it and that's that. As far as they're concerned it's just another component like a screen that gets customized to work with everything else and goes in the box, then is never touched again.
Maybe they pull the stuff Nvidia does: write an interface kernel module, then have the driver itself in a library that the module loads. Since the actual driver is never part of the kernel tree...
And courts have decided that it's not enough if you have some contributions to the kernel yourself or are a user to force them to release it, you have to have made significant contributions to force them to release it via the courts.
And Torvalds and the major kernel maintainers all refuse to enforce the GPL, and actively campaign against doing so.
It'd be a long legal discussion to properly answer your question, but luckily OEMs make it easy for us:
On most phones, there are zero external kernel modules loaded. The SoC vendor bakes it all into the ketnel, and the OEM gets the kernel as a blob. Which means all of it is subject to the GPL.
Yep, I had to go sleep (yeah, that dreadful thing!).
But this was my main area of attack. You compiled the drivers directly into the kernel. Making it all GPL. Now, as a strict reading, I have to have the device to make the request. That's not difficult. Ive phones from a lot of US named companies.
I just want the rights enumerated in the GPL as granted to end users. I'm no kernel maintainer. Just a cranky person who wants the GPL enforced as any license.
> I just want the rights enumerated in the GPL as granted to end users. I'm no kernel maintainer. Just a cranky person who wants the GPL enforced as any license.
Yeah, it turns out it’s not that easily enforcable. There are still court cases going on, but the current legal situation seems to be that unless you’ve contributed significant code to the kernel, you have no legal leg to stand on.
Because the OEM is simply saying "yes, we violated the GPL, and infringed the copyright of the developers", but the only ones who could sue against that would be devs that contributed significant amounts of code.
It doesn’t help that not every manufacturer (especially ones from China) don’t release the source code. And when they do, they sometimes contain opaque binary blobs that don’t tell you what is happening.
