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More likely, Google have done threat modelling of their entire business and worked out that if there was ever some legal problem with using Linux (like the infa

More likely, Google have done threat modelling of their entire business and worked out that if there was ever some legal problem with using Linux (like the infamous SCO case), the amount of economic damage it would do to them would be more than whatever resources they are spending on coming up with an alternative (which will hopefully never need to be used). Also, just as Chrome gave them a seat at the table of web standardisation, and a chance to try new ideas that didn't have to go through Mozilla's approval process, having a kernel of their own allows them to influence the OS design space in ways that are more aligned to their business goals, and without needing Linus's approval.

linuxftw 6y ago
They can use BSD to build whatever they want if they're worried about the GPL. I think that someone at google built fuschia for the sake of building it. Their core business is still search, that's all Android is. If they launch their own fuschia based handset, people are unlikely to switch, OEMs are unlikely to switch. It's just a failed concept.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  See some of the sibling comments, fuchsia is BSD-licensed and has a new design not based on any Unix.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    I'm talking about BSD the operating system concerning the OP's assertion of managing risk. Last I checked (years ago), the userspace was implemented partially with musl, which reads > 'musl, pronounced like the word "mussel", is an MIT-licensed implementation of the standard C library targetting the Linux syscall API, Now, they're announcing running Linux programs on Fuchsia. Sure seems to me they're implementing a Unix-like system, even if their kernel was written from scratch. The BSD world doesn't consider the userspace very separate from the kernel space, it's all part of a single system. I would argue it's very much 'based on Unix' as soon as they start adding POSIX APIs. They're adding POSIX APIs because they work.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      They're using a fork of musl for compatibility that omits some things: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/system/libc https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/system/libc >Fuchsia does not require that programs use libc's ABI. Programs are free to use their own libc, or to do without. As has been said in other comments, it's not much different from Wine or Linux emulation in FreeBSD.

linuxftw 6y ago

They can use BSD to build whatever they want if they're worried about the GPL. I think that someone at google built fuschia for the sake of building it. Their core business is still search, that's all Android is. If they launch their own fuschia based handset, people are unlikely to switch, OEMs are unlikely to switch. It's just a failed concept.

cycloptic 6y ago
See some of the sibling comments, fuchsia is BSD-licensed and has a new design not based on any Unix.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  I'm talking about BSD the operating system concerning the OP's assertion of managing risk. Last I checked (years ago), the userspace was implemented partially with musl, which reads > 'musl, pronounced like the word "mussel", is an MIT-licensed implementation of the standard C library targetting the Linux syscall API, Now, they're announcing running Linux programs on Fuchsia. Sure seems to me they're implementing a Unix-like system, even if their kernel was written from scratch. The BSD world doesn't consider the userspace very separate from the kernel space, it's all part of a single system. I would argue it's very much 'based on Unix' as soon as they start adding POSIX APIs. They're adding POSIX APIs because they work.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    They're using a fork of musl for compatibility that omits some things: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/system/libc https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/system/libc >Fuchsia does not require that programs use libc's ABI. Programs are free to use their own libc, or to do without. As has been said in other comments, it's not much different from Wine or Linux emulation in FreeBSD.