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Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

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Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#241

Post by kortilla »

olladecarne wrote: post #195
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…

> those working for the company get considerably more say and control than outside contributors As someone who knows little about open source politics, I'm genuinely curious about how people expect this should work. What are the large open source projects that have the gold standard for this that I can learn about? My initial reaction is that if a company contributes considerably more to a project, shouldn't they hav…

These kind of projects are just “open washing” at that point. The source is available, but outsiders can’t meaningfully contribute stuff outside of the preordained roadmap nor is the project beholden to community consensus.

As an open source contributor, it’s very unfulfilling and disappointing to find out you’re essentially an unpaid contributor to a company project.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#242

Post by zepto »

cpeth wrote: post #191
cute_boi wrote: post #75

Google and Opensource a joke of century. Chrome -> Make chromium opensource but add spyware that phones home on every second and with new manifest v3 make sure extensions like ublock origin don't work Andriod -> Make tip of iceberg opensource but force every vendor to use Service and lock down whole ecosystem around it. And make sure there is no way to block ads on youtube for andriod. Fuchsia -> Initial Stage make p…

I think we should still give them credit for being the most open among their peers. MacOS, iOS, Safari and Windows are not open source at all. Edge is of course just another Chromium based browser.

They aren’t really. Safari is based on WebKit, which is very much open. Chromium is based on blink which is a fork of WebKit.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#243

Post by dhodell »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #239
JayXon wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

generate_204 is used to check if a network has internet connection or need to login at captive portal, not sure about Fuchsia but on Android if you don't want to use google server for that, you can disable the feature or change it to use a different url https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/186993/captive-p... Apple and Microsoft both have something similar but with their own website, and AFAIK there's no way t…

What I meant was remove the code to make these automatic connections to Google servers from the OS source, re-compile and re-install. That is what I look for in "open source". If I cannot edit, re-compile and re-install, much of the value to me of "open source" is lost.

But this is not always a fair label to apply. If I release a device running Android that prevents you from using your own Android, that's a problem with me and the device I released, not with Android. This seems to be conflating hardware and software -- which is understandable in the context of operating systems -- but we should be clear about the cause of the problem, which has nothing to do with the openness of the code.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#245

Post by dhodell »

kortilla wrote: post #241
olladecarne wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those working for the company get considerably more say and control than outside contributors As someone who knows little about open source politics, I'm genuinely curious about how people expect this should work. What are the large open source projects that have the gold standard for this that I can learn about? My initial reaction is that if a company contributes considerably more to a project, shouldn't they hav…

These kind of projects are just “open washing” at that point. The source is available, but outsiders can’t meaningfully contribute stuff outside of the preordained roadmap nor is the project beholden to community consensus. As an open source contributor, it’s very unfulfilling and disappointing to find out you’re essentially an unpaid contributor to a company project.

I'm playing Devil's Advocate here because I sympathize with your point, but isn't there a way you can squint and look at this weird that it's true of pretty much everything else? IBM makes tons of money off of Linux, for example. iXsystems profits off of FreeBSD. Facebook profits off of their wildly popular C++ libraries.

I think we really need to divorce "profit" from "open source". OSS is great because we can contribute our own ideas to it, because we can learn from it, because we can form communities around it. It's also useful because it's a vector for entrepreneurship. Edit: why should these be mutually exclusive properties?

It's fair to point out that it can be a vector for exploiting unpaid labor. But that's an accessibility issue that exists already. For example, it's easy to tell folks interested in the field to "do open source work" if they want to get a job in the field. If you're a low-income single parent, this doesn't make CS more accessible, it's a sick joke. Even without profit, open source isn't this bastion of opportunity that we sometimes like to think it is.

You make an excellent point that it's hard to learn large new systems. But it's not impossible. Indeed, it's possible to make super meaningful contributions to the system in "limited time", starting with net zero knowledge: https://blog.quarkslab.com/playing-around-with-the-fuchsia-o.... To that end, I have to disagree that we're the kind of project that outsiders can't meaningfully contribute to.

I've addressed the point of community consensus elsewhere. All I can say here is that I personally owe my career to open source, and I'm therefore committed to helping others do the same. We opened the project to communicate with people. My personal goal is to do this and help as many people as possible succeed professionally through this vector.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#246

Post by FlashBlaze »

zlynx wrote: post #180
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this possible on a rooted device?

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#247

Post by loeg »

bregma wrote: post #227
jcranmer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely room to innovate more fundamentally in operating system design. POSIX is effectively a 50-year old API, and there are definitely places where the API it provides is far from optimal. For something that interests me personally, the POSIX idea of ptrace and signals for debugging is a fundamentally broken and obtuse API that just don't work very well with how modern software is designed, and requires…

ptrace is a Linux thing. POSIX is not Linux.

Ptrace long predates Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptrace#Unix_and_BSD

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#248

Post by smichel17 »

olladecarne wrote: post #195
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…

> those working for the company get considerably more say and control than outside contributors As someone who knows little about open source politics, I'm genuinely curious about how people expect this should work. What are the large open source projects that have the gold standard for this that I can learn about? My initial reaction is that if a company contributes considerably more to a project, shouldn't they hav…

I feel you've picked that one paragraph to focus on and ignored OP's point. Namely:

> The whole issue I have with it is that they pretend otherwise. With go many people laboured under the misapprehension that they could have more input than was actually possible.

> The cathedral model is fine but be honest about it.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#249

Post by gwicks56 »

pmontra wrote: post #211
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…

I more or less agree with everything except > that developers didn't lose interest in the platform in favor of iOS. Developers go where users are. Some developers sell their apps on the store, others get hired to build apps that are distributed for free to make people use services they buy outside the store. Banking, business apps, etc. It's impossible to lose interest in Android. It's too big. Compare it with Window…

I'm losing interest in it, for actually some of the reasons sited. Chinese manufacturers are slowing increasing market share, and their version of Android is completely broken, to the point where if you are not a major whitelisted app, you simply can't do anything unless the app is in the foreground. It's maddening.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#250

Post by quadrangle »

tesmar2 wrote: post #166
bogwog wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully Google is broken up before they decide to discontinue Android and replace it with Fuchsia 10 years from now.

Hopefully not. They are not a monopoly and doing so would be a severe overreach. Edit: Looks like many don't understand that you have alternatives to Google and you can use them.

There's a fuzziness to the concept of monopoly. It doesn't have to mean the absolute version where no alternatives exist at all. It can (and legally does) mean that a business is so dominant that it can effectively dictate the terms of the market.

Google has a search monopoly effective enough that they can solely make or break anyone who relies on search. They have enough dominance in the market that if they were to choose to delete something from search results, it could utterly devastate all sorts of players in the market who cannot at all get by on the tiny fraction of traffic they get from other sources.

This is not the case for all areas of search, but it's the case for enough of them that the concerns about Google's monopoly are valid.

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