Except that in the case of those other OSes, they're violating licenses in order to do that. They're also working around the provided software to make it happen, instead of working in the spirit of that software's distribution model.

They're not violating any such license with Android. And they're downloading readily available copies of the software, provided by the maker for exactly that purpose. They're not "working around the provided software", they're working in the spirit of the provided software.

I don't disagree that the _hardware_ makers aren't fully open and free(libre), but so far, the OS is. And the mainline OS isn't limited (by license nor anything else) to those hardware instances. To say that the OS isn't fully free(libre) because the commercially available hardware that bundles it isn't free(libre) is rather disingenuous.

The OS isn't limited to that hardware in anyway. And just like other forms of Gnu/Linux, you can download it to put it on whatever hardware you like. It might take effort (just like early versions of Gnu/Linux did, and even still does when the hardware is new and not initially supported for Linux by the maker), but that doesn't contradict free(libre) nature of the software, if anything, that's part of what it means to be free in the libre sense - the BURDEN of being at liberty to use the software anywhere you like is that YOU may have to put in the effort of getting it to work there, if you're the pioneer of using the software on that platform.

Again, it's just like Gnu/Linux/X in the early days of Linux. There are going to be some who put non-Gnu software on top of it (X in the early days, for example, was licensed more like Apache and BSD than Gnu (and, as far as I know the original/main X distribution still is ... assuming it even still exists); and there were many commercial X environments, some based around Motif), and there are going to be hardware platforms that require hacking to get them to work (LOTS of hardware cards had cobbled together drivers, of questionable stability and quality, in the first 3-5 years of Linux). That doesn't change the libre aspect of the OS at all. Not with Gnu/Linux, not with Android.


(in fact, thinking more about X licensing, Benny's objections to the upper layers of Android being under an Apache license pretty much applies to X as well; several vendors have made customizations and optimizations to X, over the years, and not made their enhancements public (I don't recall Sun's hybrid X and Display PostScript engine (NeWS I think?) being open source, for example) ... this hasn't hurt the free/open versions of X at all, nor has it stopped Benny from being an X user and advocate, apparently)