Umm, kernel source is required to be open, otherwise you have no license to distribute the resulting kernel.
your bootloader may or may not be requied to be open, and your userspace is not required. But anything under the GPL license requires you to release the source code.
Hello again!
Just in case you do not believe me, everyone should try doing the following on your onyx devices (I have Note +)
You see that its licenses GPL Version 2. It says under item 3:
- You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; …
There is a [zh-cn] translation of the license here if anything is confusing.
Thank you!
ok,thank you for your suggeation, I’ll forward it to our R&D team soon.
I would suggest forwarding this to your legal team as well as this is a license issue.
Hello!
I know you are all very busy with 2.0 release. Did you get a response from R&D about providing kernel sources? May you PM me a developer contact? I would be love to help in any way.
This is indeed a serious issue. By not releasing your changes to the Linux kernel, you are violating the GPL 2.0 which in turn may be violating international copyright laws. This can become very expensive in terms of lawsuit costs. This is not for R&D department, but for the managers of your organisation to react on.
Hello!
I would just like to bump this topic for visibility.
For what it’s worth, you could have a lot of community development if more components were open source. For example many of the issues in this thread:
You could get more help working on these issues if people were free to install other programs on the Boox (root access, alternate ROM or even linux). Again, look at the success of the ReMarkable reader: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable. They use GNU/Linux, their source is open, and tons of people have made tools to extend the functionality of the tablet.
All the best…
Hello!
I just wanted to bump this topic again for visibility. I have not received any messages from Onyx developers.
Is there a way to contact the developers directly?
Bump for visibility, but I don’t think we will ever see an answer.
No, you will not. And this device is very expensive for testing homebrew, kernels, etc. Fear to a brick, you know.
Is an official update to Android 8 or 9 a crazy dream?
Bump for visibility.
Bump for visibility.
Sounds like a serious copyright issue. Hoping to see a resolution.
If reMarkable opened their code, I don’t think there’s much danger in Onyx opening theirs. The benefits of attracting a developer community are potentially great.
To increase in visibility, I gave a link to this topic at their CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimd1/
Maybe we should all do that 
Hello there. It seems it is a serious issue. I would contact some lawyer in order to deepen more into this. This is in more than a way an important topic.
From the user point of view, viewing the source code is very important.
From a legal point of view, if something it is not compliant with the license it is something very very important too.
It should be reported to someone. Maybe someone from the Android organization or Google(?) just sayin’.
Thank you for your time @joga
This page has 2k views, but we still got no answer from Onyx. Why does Onyx not release kernel source code? I don’t understand what’s the point. Are they afraid of developers?
Here the CEO of Onyx says something about the GPL license and source code. Not too much. min 4:35 https://youtu.be/H2Q5hXGfZPo
Bump this thread. Please elevate the significance of releasing source code in compliance with GPL to legal and management.
Please consider releasing source code of bootloaders.
bump for visibility and more words to reach 20 characters to reach minimum chars required to post
Same here. This post needs more attention.