[ocdtrekkie]

The main difference is that copyleft currently requires some components of all new phones to be released as open source. With a permissive license, many Android vendors will not release anything open source. So you might have a much harder time figuring out how to flash the OS on them or get the drivers to work with them. Obviously some manufacturers will probably still do so, but they won't be required to as they are now.

Which is to say Fuchsia may not be closed source, but a lot of devices built on it probably will be.

[_bxg1]

Yeah- this is the only reason there's any openness at all in the mobile space right now. Android forks couldn't exist at all - much less postmarketOS - if the underlying hardware and drivers weren't open and available.

[viraptor]

The underlay hardware and drivers are currently mostly closed and unavailable. Especially the radios. That doesn't stop postmarketOS.

[_bxg1]

Surely it still relies on some of the same mechanisms that allow you to flash custom bootloaders and ROMs?

[viraptor]

A lot of bootloading / unlocking has been figured out by reverse engineering closed systems. It turns out Google is one of the few ones providing easy tools to do this on nexus / pixel phones, even though they didn't have to.

They still provide the binary drivers/firmware from upstream because there's no replacement for those.

[threatofrain]

That sounds like the relationship between you and your hardware vendor.