Android on RPI and licenses

[getty23]

Hello everyone, 

we are lately looking at different ways how to port Android on RPI and we are planning to use it commercially. Maybe you could give your recommendations on what options we are having. 

Our understanding so far is:

- The konstakang images with Lineage OS 16+ seem not to be freely usable (https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi3/). Older versions do not have this remark. 

- For the android-rpi projects (https://github.com/android-rpi/device_brcm_rpi3) I did not see a license remark. What is the status here?

- There are commercial products like emteria. Are there more alternatives?

Would be great if you could give us some hints on how to approach this. 

Thanks a lot and best regards

[Peter Yoon]

For android-rpi, we're following AOSP license which is default to Apache.

https://source.android.com/setup/start/licenses#android-open-source-project-license 

I added Apache license text on some makefiles of device_arpi_rpi4,

https://github.com/android-rpi/device_arpi_rpi4

I will add same license manifest to device_brcm_rpi3 files soon.

Some part of android-rpi could have other license like GPL.

It's because that part is forked from other project which has own license manifest.

In other case, default license of android-rpi will be AOSP license (Apache)

[Konsta]

Source code I've release in lineage-rpi (https://github.com/lineage-rpi) follows the original licensing of each project. My device trees are licensed under Apache 2.0. There's no restrictions on using the source code as long as you comply with the open source licensing. Some open source licences such as GPLv2 that is used for Linux kernel oblicates anyone distributing a binary build to also share complete corresponding source code. This is certainly something to note of building commercial products based on free and open source software.

Images (LineageOS 16 on forward) I'm sharing on my site (konstakang.com) on the other hand also include some parts that I've licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. These are some Raspberry Pi specific features and improvements that I've developed. Commercial use is not allowed with the builds that I'm sharing for free.

I think the options are to build Android from the source yourself or hire a contractor to do it for you. If Raspberry Pi 3 is the device you're targeting those are probably the only options to have any recent Android version that still has relevance.

[getty23]

Thanks Peter and Konsta for the quick replies and insight into the license restrictions. This is very helpful and will allow us to choose the right path. Thanks a lot :)

[Humming Bird]

hello konsta i cant able to get the proper image from the pi camera to raspi ...half of the image sensor is workig half is not