That's a fair position to take but in my opinion Google should see the situation and adapt to it by patching the older version especially since many of those phones do lack the capability to run 4.4 (though some may be able to skip 4.4 and run 5.0).

Even an unlocked bootloader isn't going to help you if you don't have a compatible system image, the binary drivers of one version don't necessarily work with the next because of the instability of the kernel ABI.

What Google should do is force a support requirement through the OHA.

I'm not sure why you said "car" up until this point when you are specifically referring to the ECU component of a car that has one, which of course not all cars do. Were you trying to be intentionally misleading? ECUs can be replaced irrespective of the First Sale doctrine because that copyright is not tied to the car but to the ECU.

But that is irrelevant anyway, unlike the case of Ubisoft revoking keys for games no ECU has a requirement that ties it to an owner but if it did then it would still satisfy the First Sale doctrine because it is not about being able to use the goods after they were sold but to be able to sell the copyrighted goods in the first place.

So I still don't see how you're relating an ECU to re selling insurance policies, or to Ubisoft game keys for that matter.

Even *if* your suspicions are correct the fact remains that they cannot be upgraded to 4.4.

We're talking about the First Sale Doctrine, it doesn't apply to your car.

No, it is definitely you. So please explain to me what you think the First Sale Doctrine is.

Correct.

No it would not.

No.

Where do you get the idea that when a FOSS hole is found nobody is exploiting it? How do you even know when one is found? You wait for somebody to tell you about it and assume that nothing is ever found by anybody until then?

Yes, but that is completely different. That is the operating system and it is dealing with system RAM - which the operating system controls access to anyway. What we are talking about here is video memory and processes that do not exclusively control that video memory.

Ok so clearly you have no idea what First Sale Doctrine actually is. It has to do with the ability of rightsholders to control content after it has been sold for the first time, so no, it is nothing to do with your house or your car.

The third option of course is that you don't realize that the Android operating system does not run on a JVM and therefore does need to be compiled for each architecture. Now you can be all you want but the fact is it is the third option.

that isn't the same thing as selling your insurance policy to someone else nor does it have anything to do with first sale doctrine.

It's just a software patch, OEMs can then patch their existing binaries since 4.4 won't work on most of the 4.3 devices.

Ok so how long should we expect versions of Android to be supported for?

As you say, that is really just theoretical. Doing that would be a very poor memory management system. Assuming that just because there is free memory you can allocate all of it to use for caching would be a silly thing to do. Even in the case where you can assume that your process has exclusive control and ownership of the memory pool no middleware is even going to do that as code outside that middleware but within that process could allocate GPU memory for some other use. So I doubt this would happen except in very contrived scenarios.