[kmeisthax]

Not necessarily. If the copyright owners of a license believe that the license is to be interpreted one particular way, to the point of making public statements about it, that can be construed by a court to have amended the license. At the very least you probably could argue estoppel if the owner changes their mind and decides to start suing.

In other words, if Linus says "GPLv2 doesn't require kernel installation on hardware it gets ported to and sold on", then GPLv2 doesn't for the Linux kernel, or at least the parts of it Linus owns. (In practice, a good chunk of the core kernel dev team believes this and has said so, so this also applies for them, too.)

That being said, you are correct that interpretation-related estoppels and/or implied license amendments probably wouldn't save most Android vendors, since their violations are not limited to just Installation Instructions. I know of nothing that Linus has said that would make statically linking all your drivers into a kernel with no source release OK. However, the post I was replying to was specifically talking about locked bootloaders; not that.

[ajklsdhfniuwehf]

the gpl install argument is a scary tatic that laywers tell their clients something like "if you use linux on your proprietary CD/CI build system that uses a GPLed zlib, now all your source code will have to be open"

it's utter nonsense and pure FUD.

the article everyone is talking about is about valid cases where the build is used a extra step to try to work around the GPL (akin to saying "the developer used gloves to make the code changes to the GPL'd code so it doesn't count as change", it's stupid). but as the author argee, even pointing that stupidity out is bad because it is used as fuel for the actual FUD where people using GPL correctly are mislead about what they must share