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Possibly unpopular opinion: This is a tragedy for Free Software. The Linux kernel (and specifically its GPL nature) is the best thing that has ever happened to

Possibly unpopular opinion: This is a tragedy for Free Software. The Linux kernel (and specifically its GPL nature) is the best thing that has ever happened to Free Software drivers and embedded systems. The only reason that companies release open source drivers for their products is because they are legally required to in order integrate with the Linux kernel. Clearly Google wants to move away from this world. I will mourn the day that a non-copyleft kernel supplants Linux and our only reason for free software hardware support comes to and end.

wolverine876 5y ago
How is Fuschia licensed?
- therealrootuser 5y ago
  It isn't GPL; I believe it is tri-licensed in BSD, MIT, and Apache 2.
- asciimike 5y ago
  https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/policy/open-source-licensing-policies#licenses https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/policy...
- blendergeek 5y ago
  Fuschia is licensed under the BSD license as far as I can tell. This allows device vendors to use fuschia without releasing device specific software to the community resulting in further degraded software freedom.
bogwog 5y ago
This is also why Android is such a security and privacy nightmare, with the terrible user experience (and environmental impact) of having to buy a new phone every 1-2 years. Because Android is not GPL. Google owns the software, so manufacturers really only make money from the device sales, and bundled spyware.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  You don't need a new Android phone every two years and you haven't needed to for a while now. The Android situation certainly isn't as good as the Apple situation, but it's not as bad as ten years ago. For most people, the only problem using a five year old phone today is the degraded battery. Almost all software is backwards compatible with the old operating systems and nobody simply outside IT cares about kernel updates. Journalists, human rights activists and American refugees like Snowden should fear kernel exploits, your average Joe is pretty unlikely to actually get infected. The massive segregation of Android devices is actually a good thing in this scenario, because you need to prepare your exploits for whole ranges of devices and several versions software versions, making "the Android botnet that ends all Android botnets" incredibly hard to build. The Android privacy nightmare is all Google being built around spying; the security nightmare is mostly due to brands like Samsung not releasing timely updates, not necessarily because Broadcom and Qualcom don't build patches. With medium to high end Samsung devices now reaching four years of Android security updates, the entire field is slowly becoming much better. The cheaper, low-end devices lag behind, but it figures that people who cannot afford a $300 phone can't pay for software support and the profit margins become razor thin the cheaper the phone gets. Five years of software updates for a $90 phone just isn't realistic. This whole situation is why I lament Windows Phone's failure. Microsoft had the right idea, which carriers hated, that the operating system should be independent of the rest of the device. Carriers wanted to force their ugly branding everywhere and fought hard against MS, who themselves bumbled and failed spectacularly by breaking backwards compatibility with every major Windows Phone release, and the entire project was doomed to fail. Android could have been similar to Linux; a Google-supported core repository with vendor packages for drivers, updatable in the same way Debian is. Nobody outside the hacker community seems interested in this approach, but it could have been.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
IshKebab 5y ago
I disagree. One of the things that stops people from actually using Linux is that it is so hard to get devices working properly. I would be willing to accept some closed source drivers if it meant Linux actually worked reliably on most modern hardware (no it really doesn't).
est31 5y ago
I think you give some valid concerns. I definitely understand you, but I want to give some counter arguments to where I'm seeing chances with Fuchsia in addition to the dangers that you rightfully point out. First, there are thriving non-copyleft driver projects, like mesa. No copyleft forces Intel to contribute to it. No copyleft forces AMD. Second, even in Linux, many drivers aren't maintained by their vendors, but third parties. I think that an upstream driver is generally easier to deal with for most parties, so most parties would prefer it. If fuchsia is indeed as modular as it promises to be, users can swap out those drivers, at least in custom ROMs. Android custom ROMs already copy over proprietary drivers from the native OS upon installation. Third, the GCC compiler has artificially restricted the ability to use it as a backend for third party languages, which led to many projects choosing LLVM instead. These projects now contribute to LLVM's success. Yes, some extensions to LLVM are proprietary. Still many companies contribute to LLVM directly. Fourth, legal action doesn't turn a company into a good citizen. They might release the source code in the end but they become extremely hostile to free software projects coming forward, because suddenly the legal department got involved. Those employees who share the cause can't freely talk on mailing lists any more because all mails to the project first require approval by a company lawyer. Etc. The released source code might be unusable anyways because it's done to a fork of an outdated version of the kernel.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > First, there are thriving non-copyleft driver projects, like mesa. No copyleft forces Intel to contribute to it. No copyleft forces AMD. This is not entirely true. Mainline Linux has a longstanding policy of not including kernel-side graphics support in the officially-released tree unless it can be used with a totally Free userspace. So Mesa is, to some extent, piggybacking on incentives that have been established as part of the GPL'd Linux kernel.
lamontcg 5y ago
Well if you hang Free Software's hopes entirely on the Linux kernel, or the Linux kernel doesn't mature to the point where it isn't the hall monitor for everyone's code quality, then that might be what happens. Darwin might be knocking. Evolve or die. (And its a bit weird that the Linux kernel is so centralized with a cabal lead mostly by one dude who yells at everyone on the planet about their shitty driver code quality. If you're at all Libertarian or libertarian, that should probably bug you a bit that Free Software picked that as the ideal model.)
pjmlp 5y ago
Linux only happened because Microsoft didn't care to put much love on their POSIX subsystem for Windows NT, and BSD was busy fighting AT&T. Looking at the pleothora of BSD/Apache/MIT OSes appearing for embeeded devices it is clear what the future of Linux will become, when the generation that gave birth to it is gone.
Shorel 5y ago
Completely true. Also, the reason so much hardware doesn't have drivers for Linux until after many years, when it has been reverse-engineered. So, it is both an advantage, and a hindrance.

wolverine876 5y ago

How is Fuschia licensed?

therealrootuser 5y ago
It isn't GPL; I believe it is tri-licensed in BSD, MIT, and Apache 2.
asciimike 5y ago
https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/policy/open-source-licensing-policies#licenses https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/policy...
blendergeek 5y ago
Fuschia is licensed under the BSD license as far as I can tell. This allows device vendors to use fuschia without releasing device specific software to the community resulting in further degraded software freedom.

bogwog 5y ago

This is also why Android is such a security and privacy nightmare, with the terrible user experience (and environmental impact) of having to buy a new phone every 1-2 years. Because Android is not GPL. Google owns the software, so manufacturers really only make money from the device sales, and bundled spyware.

jeroenhd 5y ago
You don't need a new Android phone every two years and you haven't needed to for a while now. The Android situation certainly isn't as good as the Apple situation, but it's not as bad as ten years ago. For most people, the only problem using a five year old phone today is the degraded battery. Almost all software is backwards compatible with the old operating systems and nobody simply outside IT cares about kernel updates. Journalists, human rights activists and American refugees like Snowden should fear kernel exploits, your average Joe is pretty unlikely to actually get infected. The massive segregation of Android devices is actually a good thing in this scenario, because you need to prepare your exploits for whole ranges of devices and several versions software versions, making "the Android botnet that ends all Android botnets" incredibly hard to build. The Android privacy nightmare is all Google being built around spying; the security nightmare is mostly due to brands like Samsung not releasing timely updates, not necessarily because Broadcom and Qualcom don't build patches. With medium to high end Samsung devices now reaching four years of Android security updates, the entire field is slowly becoming much better. The cheaper, low-end devices lag behind, but it figures that people who cannot afford a $300 phone can't pay for software support and the profit margins become razor thin the cheaper the phone gets. Five years of software updates for a $90 phone just isn't realistic. This whole situation is why I lament Windows Phone's failure. Microsoft had the right idea, which carriers hated, that the operating system should be independent of the rest of the device. Carriers wanted to force their ugly branding everywhere and fought hard against MS, who themselves bumbled and failed spectacularly by breaking backwards compatibility with every major Windows Phone release, and the entire project was doomed to fail. Android could have been similar to Linux; a Google-supported core repository with vendor packages for drivers, updatable in the same way Debian is. Nobody outside the hacker community seems interested in this approach, but it could have been.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

IshKebab 5y ago

I disagree. One of the things that stops people from actually using Linux is that it is so hard to get devices working properly. I would be willing to accept some closed source drivers if it meant Linux actually worked reliably on most modern hardware (no it really doesn't).

est31 5y ago

I think you give some valid concerns. I definitely understand you, but I want to give some counter arguments to where I'm seeing chances with Fuchsia in addition to the dangers that you rightfully point out. First, there are thriving non-copyleft driver projects, like mesa. No copyleft forces Intel to contribute to it. No copyleft forces AMD. Second, even in Linux, many drivers aren't maintained by their vendors, but third parties. I think that an upstream driver is generally easier to deal with for most parties, so most parties would prefer it. If fuchsia is indeed as modular as it promises to be, users can swap out those drivers, at least in custom ROMs. Android custom ROMs already copy over proprietary drivers from the native OS upon installation. Third, the GCC compiler has artificially restricted the ability to use it as a backend for third party languages, which led to many projects choosing LLVM instead. These projects now contribute to LLVM's success. Yes, some extensions to LLVM are proprietary. Still many companies contribute to LLVM directly. Fourth, legal action doesn't turn a company into a good citizen. They might release the source code in the end but they become extremely hostile to free software projects coming forward, because suddenly the legal department got involved. Those employees who share the cause can't freely talk on mailing lists any more because all mails to the project first require approval by a company lawyer. Etc. The released source code might be unusable anyways because it's done to a fork of an outdated version of the kernel.

zozbot234 5y ago
> First, there are thriving non-copyleft driver projects, like mesa. No copyleft forces Intel to contribute to it. No copyleft forces AMD. This is not entirely true. Mainline Linux has a longstanding policy of not including kernel-side graphics support in the officially-released tree unless it can be used with a totally Free userspace. So Mesa is, to some extent, piggybacking on incentives that have been established as part of the GPL'd Linux kernel.

lamontcg 5y ago

Well if you hang Free Software's hopes entirely on the Linux kernel, or the Linux kernel doesn't mature to the point where it isn't the hall monitor for everyone's code quality, then that might be what happens. Darwin might be knocking. Evolve or die. (And its a bit weird that the Linux kernel is so centralized with a cabal lead mostly by one dude who yells at everyone on the planet about their shitty driver code quality. If you're at all Libertarian or libertarian, that should probably bug you a bit that Free Software picked that as the ideal model.)

pjmlp 5y ago

Linux only happened because Microsoft didn't care to put much love on their POSIX subsystem for Windows NT, and BSD was busy fighting AT&T. Looking at the pleothora of BSD/Apache/MIT OSes appearing for embeeded devices it is clear what the future of Linux will become, when the generation that gave birth to it is gone.

Shorel 5y ago

Completely true. Also, the reason so much hardware doesn't have drivers for Linux until after many years, when it has been reverse-engineered. So, it is both an advantage, and a hindrance.