Fuchsia is going to hurt humanity. If that sounds exaggerated, consider that its license's sole purpose is to allow propietary drivers and other kernel modules. In a world where google wants to have clean hands and governments want to enforce policies on computers, what do you suppose will run on your android phone in the future? That's right, a government-mandated rootkit.
Edit: Of course, I know that this is technically possible already now, but if google creates an OS with the explicit support for such a contraption, there will be an industry where companies like Samsung can buy their "legal modules" for their target markets soon.
Well I disagree and I will just say, that the way I see it, Fuchsia is just pragmatic with drivers.
You cannot really force the vendors to ship open source drivers for your OS. But you can make it easy for them to write them against a stable ABI.
I would love to have a 100% open system. But because of proprietary standards and linux drivers policy, I am forced to use windows on my laptop. I rather would have a open OS and take just the proprietary drivers. Now I have to have the core proprietary and the drivers, with the alternative of messing with linux driver configs and custom kernels again. No thank you. I got work to do.
I would take fuchsia instead, if I could.
Which is open as far as I know, so I really do not see the way from here to government mandated rootkits. At least not through fuchsia.
To be honest, I've been waiting for the Linux ecosystem to do something about the desktop and the phone and it seems that they can't get it as consistent as Apple. Anything Linux, Google always has to step in, hand-hold them and run with their own creation in the end.
Essentially, they 'used' Linux as a test-bed for Android and now replacing it all with Fuchsia which aims to be as consistent as macOS and iOS. Starting with the Nest Hub [0] where the user won't notice anything different, which that is the point.
Due to the mess created by the Linux distro ecosystem, the free form swapping of system components by the user and driver maintenance hell vendors dealing with an unstable kernel API, I won't be surprised to see Fuchsia overtake ChromeOS and Android even by this decade. Not surprised to see Fuchsia attempting to run existing Linux apps too.
This just makes the process even quicker and everyone is watching them out in the open in real time™
No, humanity in general. There has been a decades-long battle between the powers that would love to have everything tightly controlled by the manufacturer (or a consortium of corporations with admissions for a lofty fee) and users who are aware of the advantages of open computing. It's a dividing line between actually owning a computing device and something like leasing it under certain conditions even though you paid for it. As everybody household has more and more computing device, and as these become much more user-hostile, transparency and openness is needed more than ever.
"and as these become much more user-hostile, transparency and openness is needed more than ever."
Yeah, I agree to that.
Which is why I do not agree to a statement, that a new and open OS will hurt humanity, because it does not have the same restrictive licence, you would prefer.
If anything, this melodramatic mindset is really hurting the struggle to really own your hardware
Secondly, to really own your device, we need open hardware anyway. Everything else is a weak compromise.
I see your point but Linux was actually designed in this way to be an open operating system, and using closed pieces of code in it, while possible, is discouraged by developers and is causing problems for their users. What is problematic to some (=companies) is actually a boon for others (=users). Designing an operating system specifically for the sake of using closed code in the system is not good news for openness, no matter how you put it.
But yes, all things considered, it's a bit similar to Apple using BSD as a base of Mac OS X - it had some positive effects on the overall ecosystem.
> You cannot really force the vendors to ship open source drivers for your OS.
But currently, mobile SoC vendors _are_ shipping open source drivers. They must release the source code of kernel-mode drivers in compliance with the GPL.
The problem with SoC drivers is that they're not upstreamed and upstreaming them would require major effort and specialized knowledge. SoC vendors work under intense scheduling pressure and feel the need to cut corners. In other words, this code remains outside the mainline kernel because it doesn't meet the quality bar set by Linux maintainers.
Many mobile hardware vendors don't even see value in maintaining a single kernel tree supporting all their SoCs: their approach is to freeze on an LTS kernel early in the development cycle of a particular generation and then never rebase their changes onto newer kernels. They also work mostly in secret until the new SoC is unveiled.
A stable driver API would appear to solve this problem, but actually causes huge constraints for kernel development while not solving the actual driver quality issue. GKI is an attempt to go down this path, but several kernel hackers disapprove it:
"A stable driver API would appear to solve this problem, but actually causes huge constraints for kernel development while not solving the actual driver quality issue. "
Why do you think that is?
(the criticism of GKI seems to be because of different issues)
As far as I understand, it is quite a deliberate choice of linux to actually force vendors to open source their drivers.
So what happens now is what you describe: the drivers get written against one lts kernel and then shipped and mostly forgotten.
(Which is why I cannot really use my old android tablet anymore, despite the hardware did not degrade)
With a stable driver ABI, I could update to a newer android and keep the drivers as they are.
And with vendors writing drivers for a small and clear API - they could deliver better quality drivers, and update them - because they do not have tp deal with the very expensive whole kernel integration they have to redo for every kernel and every driver.
So yeah, in rainbow fairy unicorn world they all just open source everything and work in harmony and collaboration for the greater good of humanity. But in reality right now, with proprietary being the standard mode, it is just a mess. And I prefer pragmatic solutions that actually improve the status quo.
> You cannot really force the vendors to ship open source drivers for your OS.
I wish Google did exactly that.
> But because of proprietary standards and linux drivers policy, I am forced to use windows on my laptop.
How does it force you to run Windows? I don't understand. You just choose hardware designed for Linux and you don't need to care about the drivers at all.
"You just choose hardware designed for Linux and you don't need to care about the drivers at all. "
Yeah well, if you can afford this (money and time) luxery and find what you need, good for you.
My hardware needs are not met with "linux designed hardware".
I need 2 devices: full powered gaming laptop and lightweight rugged long life battery touchscreen laptop: I found nothing in that realm and I actually did searched a long time.
So I have windows and chromeOS on my mobile hardware, but I gladly take fuchsia if it would be avaible.
But it is very strongly modified and reshaped and is still no open system I can control or own. But it works. With standby times for example, my 100% linux laptops could not even dream about (and that is, with all the quirks and optimisations hacked into them) as they are worlds apart.
(standbydrain is something like from 100% to 0% battery in 2 days on full linux and over 4 weeks with chromeOS.
My windows laptop lasts at least twice the time under windows, compared to linux. With more power.
Okay, but.. there are good open source drivers too. I am actually incredulous - do you _prefer_ to use proprietary drivers, given a choice? Proprietary drivers are often locked to certain kernels, so this means you can't get updates.
>Of course, I know that this is technically possible already now, but if google creates an OS with the explicit support for such a contraption, there will be an industry where companies like Samsung can buy their "legal modules" for their target markets soon.
Do you feel the same way about Linux kernel features like eBPF and tracepoints that provide a stable ABI for monitoring all kinds of userspace and kernel activity?
I'm a little more optimistic. Without external community lifecycle standards to adhere to, the factional nature of Google will make Fuchsia an ever-changing festival of APIs and implementations as their userspace is.
Long term they'll just add friction in their ecosystem.
No, not linux itself though, rather it is the phone manufacturer who do not want open their kernel source code so that random developer can reuse their phone even when outside support terms.
This is typically an issue with the manufacturer of the System on Chip, such as Qualcomm, Mediatek or Broadcom.
They’ve likely done some CBA and determined that porting their existing platforms to new operating systems requires a lot of work, and it’s far easier to sell a new SOC to OEM instead!
TLDR; blame Board manufacturers and not the Linux operating system/community as a whole. Although Google is trying so very hard to decouple the Operating system from the drivers as a whole.
There are already many similarly licensed and capable OSes, some (e.g. FreeBSD) capable of running Linux executables. Are these hurting humanity? I guess you could argue that they've enabled proprietary OSes on, say, game consoles, which could be a negative on humanity.
The second is it strikes me as absurd that the thing standing in the way of government rootkits is copyleft licensing. The power to enforce GPL style licenses lies in government -- a corrupt government can just ignore it.
You can already ship proprietary kernel components with Linux. It happens all the time. It's why you can't use "normal" kernels on most smartphone devices. And it's easy for entities like the government or Google or Samsung or whoever to run their code in, say, TrustZone, or heck, just run Linux as a guest under a microkernel. So many ways to do it, and creating an evil BSD licensed OS with the primary purpose of furthering the surveillance state just feels ... silly to me. Because they just don't need to.
Tldr; I don't believe anyone who isn't already installed rootkits on our phones is holding out until they can do it "officially" with modules for a BSD licensed kernel.
As I wrote, the problem is not the license itself (although we see more and more problematic cases with liberally licensed software). The problem is that google does it explicitly to support propietary modules better. If you don't see how removing legal, organizational, and technical obstacles to controlled devices helps this modern policy, I cannot help you. Besides, this is not about surveillance anymore, that battle has long been lost. This is about enforcement.
> If you don't see how removing legal, organizational, and technical obstacles to controlled devices helps this modern policy, I cannot help you.
As spijdar observes, with FreeBSD the legal and technical obstacles were removed long ago. I find the claims of doom to be so overworked in your post that I am not clear as to what organisational obstacles you are talking about: can you calm down and express this point more clearly?
The argument would apply in the same way FreeBSD if google tried to move android to FreeBSD. The point is not that a kernel with such license exist, but rather that a major platform is moving from a GPL kernel to a non-GPL kernel.
This will surely harm linux phones in the future.
Whether it is the end of the world is something I do not know, but it is not a net positive for software and hardware freedom on mobile devices.
Since it's capability based, the kernel doesn't export a list of current processes. That arguably makes rootkits easier even if they live in user space.
Edit: Of course, I know that this is technically possible already now, but if google creates an OS with the explicit support for such a contraption, there will be an industry where companies like Samsung can buy their "legal modules" for their target markets soon.