Welcome to the Tech Meme-Mam ride home for Wednesday, October 17th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Google bows to the EU's demands. The biggest thing to happen to

GitHub since pool requests. Video game cheaters are getting sued and Facebook

brings back MTV's The Real World.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Responding to that EU antitrust ruling from earlier this year, Google has announced that it is

changing the licensing terms for Android, effective October 29th for devices sold in the EU anyway.

Before we dig into what's changing, let's remember how we got here.

Google has traditionally made its Android operating system available for free to device makers as long as those device makers did one of two things.

Either they bundled in the Google Play Store, plus a variety of key apps,

including Chrome, search, and Google Maps,

Gmail, and YouTube, or the device makers

could bundle none of those apps

and just

option that is quite popular in China.

The idea behind this bundling strategy is that most device makers in the US and

EU would simply just go ahead and include everything because users typically

want access to those nice Google things.

And that's good for Google.

Google makes ad revenue from search and YouTube and Gmail plus direct sales revenue from the

play store and it gets valuable data from Google Maps and Chrome usage so bundling

all these apps helps fund the ongoing development of Android and keeps the software free for device makers.

...