Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

opensource.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 334 posts

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#171

Post by ender7 »

I'm a little sad that there aren't any comments describing what is technically novel around Fuchsia and why it is/why it isn't interesting from an OS design standpoint.

I get the sense that its advances are probably too low-level for most app developers to care, but that's kind of precisely why I'd love a comment elucidating them a bit.

Edit: For example, the Fuchsia docs list the primary talking points as secure, updatable, inclusive, and pragmatic. How well does it live up to those principles? Will they bring practical benefits? What's exciting/new about what's being done here?

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#172

Post by abarth »

ender7 wrote: post #171

I'm a little sad that there aren't any comments describing what is technically novel around Fuchsia and why it is/why it isn't interesting from an OS design standpoint. I get the sense that its advances are probably too low-level for most app developers to care, but that's kind of precisely why I'd love a comment elucidating them a bit. Edit: For example, the Fuchsia docs list the primary talking points as secure, up…

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts has an overview and links deeper into the site for more detailed information.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#173

Post by sanxiyn »

ender7 wrote: post #171

I'm a little sad that there aren't any comments describing what is technically novel around Fuchsia and why it is/why it isn't interesting from an OS design standpoint. I get the sense that its advances are probably too low-level for most app developers to care, but that's kind of precisely why I'd love a comment elucidating them a bit. Edit: For example, the Fuchsia docs list the primary talking points as secure, up…

Fuchsia is a capability OS. I think that's enough to interest anyone interested in secure OS.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#174

Post by finnthehuman »

hacknat wrote: post #125
flotzam wrote: post #70

If contributing to your project requires much more than git commit --signoff — in Fuchsia's case, a full-on Google Account! — this will exclude many pseudonymous developers who conceive of things such as privacy in terms of capabilities (not pinky promises). Which seems relevant for a security-focused OS.

You can't pseudonymously contribute to most OSes of note. Linux for example.

Is it Debian-level keysigning where you need to have an ID checked? Or do you just need a better fake name than hackerman420?

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#175

Post by loeg »

hollerith wrote: post #19
brandmeyer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux itself has never been a GNU project and has never required copyright assignment. It is the combination of features (retain ownership and GPL) together that has enabled collaboration in Linux.

Are you saying that collaboration on Gnu Compiler Collection, binutils, bash, bison, CLISP, coreutils, etc, has been inhibited by the requirement for copyright assignment to the FSF?

Sure. I don't contribute to projects that require copyright assignment to the FSF. For one thing, it's a major hassle for new contributors. For another, I don't particularly like or trust the FSF.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#176

Post by jeffrallen »

barnacled wrote: post #167

I am a Linux kernel contributor and former golang and chromium contributor and to be honest the latter experiences makes me leary about contributing to another Google project. There generally tends to be an insular 'cathedral' rather than 'bazaar' approach to Google projects where those working for the company get considerably more say and control than outside contributors. The whole issue I have with it is that they…

I'm a longtime Go watcher, and sometime Go contributor and I agree with this, 100%. Go has benefitted from having a BDFL employed by Google. But outsiders will always be outsiders.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#177

Post by snvzz »

twh270 wrote: post #149

Is there any comparison between Fuchsia and the Genode OS, which is also capability-based? I'm wondering what one has/does that the other doesn't?

Fuchsia is an OS. Genode's a framework for creating operating systems. It's not comparable.

What's interesting imho is to compare seL4 with zircon. The former is a third generation microkernel. The latter is still a first generation microkernel or, according to google, not a microkernel at all.

It's thus not very interesting from a computer science perspective. In practical terms, I'm sure it'll be better than Linux and IOS/OSX, but that's a very low bar to meet.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#178

Post by com2kid »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #102
mmastrac wrote: post #4

I've heard Fuchsia referred to as a "principal engineer retention project" at Google. I'd be curious to know if others have heard the same.

> I've heard Fuchsia referred to as a "principal engineer retention project" at Google. No rational company is going to create useless projects just to retain expensive engineers. What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pay them to work on something without expected ROI?

> No rational company is going to create useless projects just to retain expensive engineers. What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pay them to work on something without expected ROI?

(Short) story time!

Windows on ARM was a solo pet project of a high level engineer at Microsoft!

There are some engineers who are so valuable that letting them spend non-trivial amounts of time on whatever they want is a very good use of company resources.

Sometimes just not letting the competition have them is valuable!

I've worked with a few 10x-20x engineers, if someone is that productive, they can spend 2 years off on another non-ROI project, come back, and spend 2 years on a project with ROI, and the company still comes out ahead.

Most company's aren't smart enough to figure this out, then again determining who these people are is also a problem. That latter part is funny (ironic?), because on the ground floor everyone who encounters a world class engineer is pretty darn sure of it.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#180

Post by zlynx »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #157
jasonvorhe wrote: post #123

I don't understand the cynicism here. Android's fragmentation was the original sin that lead to fragmentation and the new that we've seen for years, until Google semi-fixed the mess with a) Play Services (short term) and b) Project Treble. Google were so convinced of the value of open source that they didn't anticipate that almost all OEM's would rather ship their Android forks than to stay close to upstream. If they…

You can easily sideload an app, sure. But recent version of Android restricted background running of the apps, making developers dependent on push notifications, and FCM notifications won't work without Google services.

On the first hand, I really appreciate the 30 - 40 hours of battery runtime my Pixel 5 has now. Restricting background apps is a big part of this.
Post reply on HN