4 ms·

Well, fuchsia seems to be better designed and from what I've heard they had intention to rewrite their kernel in Rust. Eventually. Fuchsia seems to be FOSS. S

Well, fuchsia seems to be better designed and from what I've heard they had intention to rewrite their kernel in Rust. Eventually. Fuchsia seems to be FOSS. So, in case a new userland appears on top of this legacy-free system I, probably, would be happier than I am right now on damn Linux where nothing works as it should and everything segfaults.

dnautics 5y ago
I think rust is a singularly poor choice to write a kernel, due to the datastructures required, poor support and interop between libraries and nostd, in the long run macros obscuring code and making understanding timing attacks difficult, e.g. but that's just my opinion... If you have the resources of google, you might as well write it in another language and apply a proof solver for security assurances (or just use SeL4).
tored 5y ago
Problem is that the software license has become irrelevant for the largest tech companies. In the old days there was a fear among them, and probably rightly so, that their software would be "stolen" if they went open source. But today every large corporation is running projects as open source without any fear. What happened? For one these projects are so complex it is not feasible for Joe the programmer to read thru all of it, it takes a company of the size of Google or Microsoft to manage it. The other thing is that the business model changed. Now they give stuff away for "free" to lock you in and spy on your every move and then monetize it. Third is the close integration of hardware and software, so even if someone forked Fuchsia it would be utterly pointless because of hardware. What Google has shown is that it is possible to operate one of that largest spying agencies in the world all on open source.
- pfraze 5y ago
  They still don’t open source their secret sauce.
  - type0 5y ago
    If they would I'd call that business model open sauce

dnautics 5y ago

I think rust is a singularly poor choice to write a kernel, due to the datastructures required, poor support and interop between libraries and nostd, in the long run macros obscuring code and making understanding timing attacks difficult, e.g. but that's just my opinion... If you have the resources of google, you might as well write it in another language and apply a proof solver for security assurances (or just use SeL4).

tored 5y ago

Problem is that the software license has become irrelevant for the largest tech companies. In the old days there was a fear among them, and probably rightly so, that their software would be "stolen" if they went open source. But today every large corporation is running projects as open source without any fear. What happened? For one these projects are so complex it is not feasible for Joe the programmer to read thru all of it, it takes a company of the size of Google or Microsoft to manage it. The other thing is that the business model changed. Now they give stuff away for "free" to lock you in and spy on your every move and then monetize it. Third is the close integration of hardware and software, so even if someone forked Fuchsia it would be utterly pointless because of hardware. What Google has shown is that it is possible to operate one of that largest spying agencies in the world all on open source.

pfraze 5y ago
They still don’t open source their secret sauce.
- type0 5y ago
  If they would I'd call that business model open sauce