Interesting times ahead of us, but looks like they are going to try it out slowly:
Real made by Google? What does this tell us?! Which Devices they mean?
Makes me afraid! Another OS to trick the user?
1 Like
Fuchsia OS kernel Zircon was made by same person Travis Geiselbrecht who made Haiku kernel NewOS. Some parts of Zircon kernel source (EFI headers) are used in Haiku. He is also one of authors of BeOS kernel.
5 Likes
That is not correct. He started the NewOS kernel because he was frustrated of working at Be on other things than the kernel.
According to Travis, several other people working on Fuchsia were previously employed at Be too. I recently discovered that Brian J. Swetland, who designed our kernel debugger font appears to be one of them, for example (I did not find more info about the story of this font and how it ended up in Haiku, however).
3 Likes
I donât get excited about anything Google works on anymore. The company is evil!
8 Likes
Most big companies can be considered evil in one way or another, yet this should not discard technological merit they may show from time to time. Many have brilliant engineers who are also good people in general, hence discarding some exciting tech right off the bat purely because it got incubated in company X or Y is a wrong approach, IMO.
4 Likes
Not when the technology being developed comes with bad intentions. Big tech tyranny is bad in general!
4 Likes
Can you elaborate what bad intentions you find in developing modern and open-source microkernel for everyone out there?
1 Like
Itâs a business-friendly licensed Linux kernel alternative. Backward compatible to the Linux kernel with all the quirks. The bad parts are never in the open-source parts though. The craplets and app store contain viscious spyware. Since the license isnât GPL any more, Google is free to use more binary blobs to make their spyware harder to detect or sidestep.
My advice: scavenge the good parts and leave the rest behind.
4 Likes
Google is big tech and not very friendly to an open and free internet. Theyâve currently been engaging in internet censorship of views they donât agree with and that should be very concerning to folks. So Google like other big tech behemoths, can no longer be trusted with influencing computer technology and how we use it. I see Google Chrome as the next Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 like threat to the World Wide Web, which is a great example.
1 Like
Android wasnât bothered by the GPL either, nothing in android userspace is licensed GPL. The only difference is that kernel modules may now be licensed differently. (or arent required to be kernel modules in the first place)
Linux has got closed binary blobs all around, despite being GPL, so this argument is not convincing at all. Have you perused Fuchsia code and found anything of concern there?
2 Likes
As the discussion seems a bit one sided, remember that Google is one of the only companies that supported Haiku a lot. Google Summer of Code and Google Code In has been crucial for us, and I think at some point we have also gotten donations.
As far as I know the only other well-known company that supported us is Mozilla, who donated their old build servers to us.
7 Likes
Also remember that Google is very large, and as such, it canât possibly be 100% evil or 100% good. There are many people working there, each probably with different intentions. One team happens to be paid to write a new and nice open source OS. It does not say anything about the privacy-invasive ad technology that funds Google, I think?
Also it seems strange that you are advocating the GPL here on the Haiku forums, when the Haiku team has decided to use the MIT explicitly to allow their code to be reused in closed source software easily (at the time, in the hope that someone would continue BeOS and could then integrate their work in it).
15 Likes
Re:GPL
This isnât the first time that code had to be replaced because it used the GPL. LLVM was developed by Apple and Google when GCC adopted version 3 of the GPL license. The Linux kernel just took a little longer because Mr. Torvalds kept it GPL v2 and added an LGPL bridge for kernel modules as was mentioned with regards to Android.
It takes a lot of effort and energy to replace central technologies like GCC and the Linux kernel. A small entity like the Haiku team couldnât do as much replacing and shuffling of licenses to suit them to make an LLVM replacement, for example, as Google and Apple have done. Thatâs not always a bad thing. Iâm glad LLVM has partially replaced GCC because it is much more modular than GCC. It appears Zircon will be much more modular than the Linux kernel also.
I wouldnât bother to talk too much about fuchsia.
The fact that it was not announced in a big Google Event, and the fact that this announcement came after HarmonyOS was announced to be released officially on 2.June ⌠is for me a good hint, that fuchsia is not worth to be talked up right now, maybe never. Seeing how google was all the time trying to hurt the competition and in the end gave up nearly all their productsâŚ
Hangouts, google voice, etc etc âŚ, google plus. Remember the word wide hyped Project Loon.
Remember Waze? Remember âGoogle Xâ? The Team of the worlds greatest developers and scientists that the planet ever saw and their great âmoonshotsâ.
To me, google looks like a quite mediocre company that has success because they dominate the internet. Google search is the only real service I currently use. Also GMail, but I already have plans on replacing gmail with my own mail server.
I understand that you might be trilled by google announcements, since I was many years ago a google fan too.
cipri
4 Likes
They continue to do very well the one product that brings them money: Google AdSense. And the tools that allow them to collect users private data for better targetting the ads: the web browser (to know which websites you visit), the mail client and server (to know your emails), Maps (to know where you live and which places you visit), etc. The other projects are just some engineers having fun. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. And since they donât make any money of it they have no reason to keep maintaining things up.
As for Fuchsia, it is open source and even if Google stops maintaining it, itâs quite possible that someone else would continue it. Weâll see how that goes.
4 Likes
Even if not for Fuchsia itself, just having Zircon actively developed and invested in by major corp - is a huge win. This could mean good hardware support, new systems etc. Just wonder if one day Haiku might find it reasonable to use this kernel as well, with Haikuâs API on top.
1 Like
So far we had the âHaiku should switch to linux!â opinion, but now we got an additional one.
2 Likes
I didnât say it should switch, I am merely contemplating the possibility. And switching to Linux is a bad idea - it is GPLed.