121–130 of 172 posts
Android for all practical purposes is as good as a closed ecosystem with apps tied to closed source Google services and the inability to run Linux on your Android phones. This kind of lip service and self serving tip toeing around the spirit of open source in many ways does more harm to open source than closed source. How is it that devices drivers that work on Android perfectly are not available for use on Linux? Wh…
"dev, gn, /svc, /pkg, PA_VMAR_ROOT" Hate this old unix approach for name shortening, what makes them unreadable and non intuitive. If they break compatibility anyway, they could name things in a way, that people can read like a book.
How to request capabilities at run time? Android has shown that the approach of asking for a list of capabilities while installing does not work for user-facing applications. Apps will grab just as much as capabilities as possible and users will blindly accept the long list without reading.
You send a message to a process that dishes out capabilities and it responds with a handle/port/object that encodes those capabilities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Things changed after enough time and revenue with a huge gap between ASOP and Android experience." No, things changed for other vendors and for other parts . You can, AFAIK, still happily compile Google's entire kernels. You are thinking of userspace.
> still happily compile Google's entire kernels Google's, sure. Some vendors make it painful (and in some cases, even impossible) to compile kernels for their devices. Google is legally obligated to release kernels for their device. With Fuchsia, neither it nor any of the other hardware makers would be. Google might still continue to release their kernels — say, for developer contributions — but other vendors are qui…
Vendors won't modify fuchsia or its microkernel (magenta). That's the point behind the driver APIs in fuchsia. This should allow Google to update the full system, kernel included, while leaving the vendor drivers, which run in user mode and will still work due to the API being still supported, alone.
If Android is ported to fuchsia, that would solve the android update problem for good.
Android for all practical purposes is as good as a closed ecosystem with apps tied to closed source Google services and the inability to run Linux on your Android phones. This kind of lip service and self serving tip toeing around the spirit of open source in many ways does more harm to open source than closed source. How is it that devices drivers that work on Android perfectly are not available for use on Linux? Wh…
This is definitely true, and I have a lot of issues with Google and their lip service to open source. (People reading my history will attest, I'm sure.) But at the very least, Fuchsia will be a lot more secure by design than Android, and Android is the dominant OS platform on earth. The state we are right now, where 85% of mobile devices run Android, and 0.7% of them are actually up to date, is a terrifying place to…
"dev, gn, /svc, /pkg, PA_VMAR_ROOT" Hate this old unix approach for name shortening, what makes them unreadable and non intuitive. If they break compatibility anyway, they could name things in a way, that people can read like a book.
I don't have trouble understanding dev, /svc and /pkg because they're already common abbreviations. The gn and PA_VMAR_ROOT I'd have to look up, but if I'm using it constantly, I don't mind needing to learn. I mean, I needed to learn to use Vim, too, and now I'd never want anything else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Part of the motivation is certainly to get away from the GPL requirements of using Linux," Certainly why? I know, in fact, this is pretty much a non-consideration, so i'm really curious what makes you believe it is. In fact, the fuchsia kernel is completely open source, so ... If you were to bug the SFLC/others, you'd see Google is, in fact, quite happy releasing kernel changes, and is pretty much one of the only co…
> If you were to bug the SFLC/others, you'd see Google is, in fact, quite happy releasing kernel changes, and is pretty much one of the only companies that has either pushed vendors to open source drivers, or, in a number of cases, rewritten proprietary android drivers as open source just so it can release them! "Happy" is a funny word though. Google is legally obligated to release kernel changes and legally forbidde…
I suppose the OP was also talking about the changes done to improve linux for datacenter workflows, afaik there is no obligation to release the changes there.
So I'm not clear what the puropse of fuchsia is. I understand it's an os which may replace android or chomeos but why the move away from linux based systems? Both are open source platforms.
Fuchsia uses a microkernel (Magenta) which is more secure and technically elegant, but usually comes at the cost of performance. Google's position as the primary/sole developer of Fuchsia also gives them the control to build the OS in commercially lucrative ways that don't necessarily earn the approval of the Linux open source community (programming shortcuts, proprietary/non-GPL extensions, etc).
Historically, with (ancient) 1st generation microkernels like Mach (used in OSX/IOS), sure.
Else, this article's decent: http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2016/01/01/0/
"dev, gn, /svc, /pkg, PA_VMAR_ROOT" Hate this old unix approach for name shortening, what makes them unreadable and non intuitive. If they break compatibility anyway, they could name things in a way, that people can read like a book.
I agree, I would much prefer short but full names (lowercase). svc is especially cringy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Part of the motivation is certainly to get away from the GPL requirements of using Linux," Certainly why? I know, in fact, this is pretty much a non-consideration, so i'm really curious what makes you believe it is. In fact, the fuchsia kernel is completely open source, so ... If you were to bug the SFLC/others, you'd see Google is, in fact, quite happy releasing kernel changes, and is pretty much one of the only co…
> In fact, the fuchsia kernel is completely open source, so ... That's orthogonal. Open source != GPL (which lots of companies avoid). Or is it GPL too?