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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

What's the context? Maybe knowing who this individual is would help me?

Edit: ah an Android OS dev. I imagine that's a primary party to Android and therefore this individual is kind of an authority.

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>ah an Android OS dev

She is in the wide sense of the term: she has made some contributions to AOSP. But only Google has actual knowledge of the future of their OS, and she doesn't work for them.

Google is eradicating all GPL from their mobile offering.

Fuschia will let them release a fully closed down platform.

Fuchsia is permissively licensed. I swear, copyleft people have the weirdest definition of freedom. How does using a license that lets you do anything with the code, including using it to compete commercially with Google, automatically indicate some nefarious plan to lock down the new platform? If they wanted to do that, why would they release Fuchsia under a permissive license in the first place?

The main difference is that copyleft currently requires some components of all new phones to be released as open source. With a permissive license, many Android vendors will not release anything open source. So you might have a much harder time figuring out how to flash the OS on them or get the drivers to work with them. Obviously some manufacturers will probably still do so, but they won't be required to as they are now.

Which is to say Fuchsia may not be closed source, but a lot of devices built on it probably will be.

Yeah- this is the only reason there's any openness at all in the mobile space right now. Android forks couldn't exist at all - much less postmarketOS - if the underlying hardware and drivers weren't open and available.

The underlay hardware and drivers are currently mostly closed and unavailable. Especially the radios. That doesn't stop postmarketOS.

Surely it still relies on some of the same mechanisms that allow you to flash custom bootloaders and ROMs?

A lot of bootloading / unlocking has been figured out by reverse engineering closed systems. It turns out Google is one of the few ones providing easy tools to do this on nexus / pixel phones, even though they didn't have to.

They still provide the binary drivers/firmware from upstream because there's no replacement for those.

That sounds like the relationship between you and your hardware vendor.

People are concerned a copyfree license will enable Google and manufactures to lock down the platform. Why do so many people have trouble understanding this kind of thing and have to turn the debate into an argument about the definition of the word "freedom"?

Most people don’t run software they built from source code on their phone. If what they’ve done with proprietary Android additions is any indication, you’ll have no idea what you’re really running on your Fuchsia device.

One big feature Fuchsia has over Linux is stable kernel driver ABI. It is reasonable to predict that while Android kernel drivers are open by necessity, Fuchsia kernel drivers will be closed unlike Fuchsia kernel itself.

Isn’t only the kernel and the OS permissively licensed? There’s nothing stopping Google and others from making all of the non-OS features closed source.

The nice thing about copyleft is that it’s infectious.

GPLv2 for a kernel isn't super infectious because your entire userspace can be proprietary. And you can also ship proprietary kernel modules as long as you make sure there's a minimim of logical separation. And even if you don't it hasn't been tested if the kernel plus a bundled kernel modue constitutes a derived work.

So you now basically have full control and can make nigh arbitrary modifications to both user and kernel space while only having to show the source of the kernel itself. Not super powerful in practice. Pretty deal for the kernel devs though.

Isn't parts of ios bsd licenced too? Does that help if the phone vendor only hands out blobs?

So, closed source with tracking enabled. Can it get worse?

Google Play Services is already closed-source and that’s where the tracking happens. The fact that the base OS is technically open source is usually irrelevant if you have any proprietary Google junk on top of it. But your baseband is allowing you to be tracked too (regardless of the software on the application processor), so it’s hardly possible (certainly not easy) to have any privacy with a cell phone in your possession.

Given fuschia is developed in the open (https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/), what do you mean by "fully closed platform"?

I thought Fuschia was BSD licensed? Isn't the source avalible online?

Sure they can add binary blobs, but they do that already with android.

Not that i trust google, because i don't ;)

It's far from fully closed, it's just not copyleft anymore.

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