[guardian-dev] asking Google to open source the Play Services Android libraries

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at at.or.at
Mon Mar 13 09:20:26 EDT 2017


Apps like Firefox, Whisper Systems Signal, and many more are all free,
open source software except for the jars they include to support Play
Services GCM.  This is becoming such a problem that people are
implementing their own version of the GCM library so that the apps can
be all open source.

A better solution would be for Google to open source their GCM jars.
I'm talking about only the jars that are distributed as part of the
google_m2repository distributed as part of Android Studio.  This jar is
32k, so a pretty small bit of code.  I talked with some reasonably high
up Android people and they thought this was a reasonable request.

Let's lobby Google to open-source the jars that Firefox, Signal, etc use
so we can have 100% free Firefox, etc on Android.  I also asked Mozilla
to join in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1346761

And I also sent an email to the email that I could find for Play
Services.  Contacting Play Services is pretty opaque.  Anyone know a
good way to get through to the Play Services team?  They are based in
London.

.hc


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