The tech world was abuzz last week with Google’s Android VP Hugo Barra’s sudden departure to Chinese smartphone upstart Xiaomi. His departure has been linked to a complicated love triangle involving Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, who is reported to have recently split with his wife.
His sudden departure brought to the forefront a smartphone company that’s little known outside of China: Xiaomi. What was it, and how had it been able to snap up Android’s most visible public figure?
News reports gushed about Xiaomi’s growth, its $10 billion valuation, and Hugo’s role to lead the growth of the Chinese smartphone phenomenon outside of China.
Surely, Hugo Barra will be playing a bigger role at Xiaomi than at Google, but is there more that we need to know about Xiaomi?
Open-Source Ethos, the GPL and Apache
On Hacker News, part of the smaller, un-noticed discussion about Xiaomi revolved around the company’s use of the open-source Android operating system. User yareally said of Xiaomi, “I’m not a fan of it really due to the fact it’s closed source and I won’t touch any Android ROM that doesn’t post its source. Quite a number of people like it, but there’s many other options out there.” He further comments on the legality of the Xiaomi operating system: “However the ironic part is the areas of the Android source they must disclose under GPL, they avoid sharing. They don’t release the kernel for any of their devices as well and that’s a huge GPL violation. I would presume if they did release it for their own phones, it would be on here with the rest of their stuff.”
You see, the complexity revolves around Android and its open-source nature. Add to that complex software licensing policies and China, and you have a complicated quagmire of legal and ethical ramifications.
Most open-source software today is licensed under two major licenses: the GPL and Apache licenses. While the GPL requires that any downstream software based on a GPL-software is fully open-sourced, the Apache license has no such requirement: anyone is welcome to adapt and use Apache-licensed software for their own use, without needing to contribute the source back to the owner.
The GPL has proven to be a legally-enforceable license in the United States: lawsuits against large vendors for violating the GPL license have been largely validated by the courts, or large settlements in favor of the open-source project owner have taken place.
But not so in China. The popular tech news site Slashdot had earlier reported in November 2012 about a petition by software developers asking Xiaomi to comply with the GPL license and make their modifications to the operating system public.
With no intellectual property safeguards and no legal precedent, the open-source field is a free-for-all in China. Hacker News again points out precedents of reverse hold-ups happening in China. And another example given by user verroq says “Just look at the recent case where someone’s game engine was cloned, translated and sold in China.”
In an even worse case, user lunarscape gives an example of where the original developers of the open-source software were actually stabbed in the back by their Chinese manufacturers: “The vast majority of Chinese tablet manufacturers do not honour the GPL and it’s already killed one Linux tablet project, CordiaTab. In that case the Chinese company actually tried to extort money from the developers.”
Parallel’s to Alibaba’s Aliyun OS?
Xiaomi’s using open-source software like Android and modifying it without contributing back to the source isn’t without precedent. In 2012, Chinese software and services company Alibaba attempted to push a fork of Android called Aliyun OS to the market, and almost released a phone with Acer, till a reversal by Acer at the last minute. It has been reported in the press that Google recommended that its partner Acer stay away from the Aliyun OS.
The Epoch Times did an investigative report of the history of the Aliyun OS, and along with Android Police, uncovered rampant software piracy of commercial Android apps on its software marketplace at that time. And similar to Xiaomi, Alibaba used open-source Android, modified it, but did not publish its source (this would result in suspicion that Alibaba had modified Android in unconventional ways, possibly resulting in security exceptions that could allow attackers to easily take over a Aliyun based smartphone.)
Triumvariate of Chinese technology companies
With Xiaomi, a triumvariate of Chinese technology companies looking to dominate the technology sector has emerged and come full circle: Huawei (networking and enterprise equipment), Lenovo (desktops and laptops) and Xiaomi (smartphones).
So while Android fans are wishing Hugo Barra all the best in his new career, here’s hoping that he’s not going in with eyes fully closed into unseen gray areas of the technology world.
