Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

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> while we're picky about free software on our laptops, desktops and servers lots of us have a truck load full of proprietary software in their pocket every day. Does it have to be that way?

It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry.

Thus, as demonstrated for many years of failed alternatives, unfortunately buzzwords like 'privacy', 'non-free software' and 'Linux' have little to no use to gaining traction and selling to mass market in a comparable manner against the existing duopoly.

And before you say 'Android', it is has tons of closed source userland software and subsystems and will get even worse once it moves over to Fuchsia OS. Therefore 'Android' as a free software example is disqualified.

We are talking about Linux distros designed to run on phones with 'free software'.

> It doesn't have to be like this, but it is also not 'early days' anymore and we have given this idea lots of time to gain any meaningful traction and it's very clear that there is almost no interest from the wider industry.

I really don't think we did. The last serious effort that didn't rely on Android was Maemo/MeeGo (which wasn't even fully FLOSS), and before that Openmoko. Maaaaybe you could count Tizen too, although it was a project with different enough focus that I'm not really sure about that. I have used Nokia N900 up until I was able to replace it with Librem 5, because there was simply no alternative I considered viable. We have spent many years with no reasonable hardware platform for mobile GNU/Linux efforts and even projects like Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch had to be based on Android stack until Librem 5 and PinePhone appeared on the stage.

Time to give this idea some meaningful traction has just started in the last years, and the fact that this time it actually gets serious backing from major DEs (GNOME, Plasma) and distros (Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, ...) makes it as viable as it never was before. There's a lot of cross-pollination happening these days, which back in the Openmoko days was mostly limited to tech that never ended up being used outside of these communities (such as FSO). The best we got back then was getting SHR stack partially packaged in Debian, while today, whole GNOME and KDE carry this stuff forward (things like libadwaita and Kirigami are major building blocks of desktop apps too these days).

Is this the one time people should be calling it GNU/Linux?

Very fine point. GNU runs on many operating systems, and so to conflate GNU and Linux seems absurd.

GNU runs on many kernels. GNU is part of the operating systems where it runs.

GNU is not a boolean value. One can use portions of it without throwing away everything they use.

Fair point, but I was responding to "GNU runs on many OSs", saying that GNU is actually part of the OSs (and not something that runs on top of it), regardless of how much GNU there is in any particular OS.

That's not really true, in broad strokes. To my knowledge, Linux distributions are the only place where GNU forms of core part of the operating system, whereas it is frequently installed as an optional component on top of, say, Solaris, AIX, or a BSD. Termux, amusingly enough, marks a return to this on top of Android on top of Linux.

That's missing my point. What I mean is that where GNU tools are installed, they are a constituent part of the operating system as opposed to running on top/despite the OS. I never said it runs on all operating systems or on all *NIX operating systems.

I'm saying that GNU runs on nearly all unix-likes - for ages, the first thing many admins would do after installing HPUX or Solaris was to immediately install GNU's tools because they're so much better than the ones built into the OS. In that case, GNU tools are installed, but they are not "a constituent part of the operating system" because they are running on top of the OS. Linux distros are unusual in that Linux is just a kernel, so GNU tools were frequently promoted to become part of the core OS there, but out of all the platforms that GNU supports that's almost the only one where they're part of the OS proper. Android then represents a kind of funny regression because Android ships without GNU tooling (instead relying on toybox for coreutils and bionic for libc), but you can once again add GNU tools on top of the OS in the form of Termux, which carries on the long tradition of being far more usable than the OS vendor default tools.

EDIT: Changed "the only one" to "almost the only one" because I remembered that HURD exists and probably also uses GNU tools as part of the OS.

You could bundle GNU software with Android and these people still wouldn't be happy.

But how many man-months of development on the GPL subset of the Android stack are funded by the mostly closed product, each day? From some angles, I'd say that it's not a failure at all (from others it certainly is), more like working as intended.

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