I don’t understand why Google didn’t just made Android closed source. They would’ve made custom roms impossible and therefore more able to control and spy on it’s users. Why did Google made Android open source, while Microsoft’s Windows is still closed source to this day?
let’s say google didn’t care and closed their software anyways. who would have sued them? and how would they find about it, since the source code is not public?
There’s a lot of money wrapped up in the Linux ecosystem. They would be no shortage of people to sue them. It would also be pretty hard to hide that your operating system is secretly Linux. The operating system image can be pulled off the phone and inspected. It would be a massive effort and probably futile to obscure. On top of that, Google has a lot of employees and someone would whistle blow. They would have to really go draconian locking things down.