Superposition of EigenelliesNov 25, 2018
ME[learning about fuchsia for the first time]: oh god I hope that's not horrible
ME [hearing about fuchsia again a few months later]: it's gonna be horrible isn't it
ME [hearing more about fuchsia about a year later]: fucking bury it in the desert, holy shit
Show threadSuperposition of EigenelliesNov 25, 2018
How I would be looking ahead if I were Google:
- The biggest flaw in Android is that it's hackable and contains privacy features that make it possible to cripple the spyware in it
- The "look but don't touch" open-source model works great, let's clamp down even harder on it
- Why don't we try packaging most of the system in nice modular binary blobs, so that things like OEM drivers, platform-specific UIs, and apps are easy to install but impossible to modify
- Also how about it tracks all of its activity at the kernel level and reports it directly to us, and you can't disable that without refusing network access to the kernel altogether
- Sure, folks will try to fork it, but that won't go well for them if the OEM driver blobs are illegal to distribute and will only work with official signed kernels
Show threadSuperposition of EigenelliesNov 25, 2018
And better yet, they don't even need to hire any copyright police to make sure you don't accidentally try to hack the driver blobs into working on an unapproved kernel - the current Android communities will handle that for them, for free.
Show threadSuperposition of EigenelliesNov 25, 2018
Presumably there will be a few "community firmware blobs" available for purchase for $25-$50 to allow you to use a hacked phone, meaning that
A) no one will bother buying those, meaning that Google will be happy
B) anyone producing free versions of those will be labeled as an evil pirate and summarily exiled
Show threadSuperposition of EigenelliesNov 25, 2018
seriously though, we're absolutely fucked regarding OEM drivers and Fuchsia.
- Zircon is MIT licensed, meaning nobody has to open-source their modifications (e.g. kernel drivers!) like they do for Linux
- Vendors love to keep their firmware and drivers as locked down as possible because semiconductor IP is fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
- Zircon is being marketed as a "microkernel" meaning that it will probably contain few or no generic drivers of its own
- We'll still have a little luck with RE, but RE is much harder than just working with published source
Basically I kinda feel like we have until whenever Fuchsia takes over the market to get FOSS hardware going, because we're really going to need it after that
Show threadBob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@diodelass I havn't looked very far into what's going on with fuchsia, but this indeed sounds bad.

Google's biggest problem with Android has always been the Linux kernel. Despite being in the Linux Foundation they don't fully control it and the GPL license makes it hackable and redistributable as you describe. Try to upstream the kernel level spying in Linux and, Coc or no CoC, Linus will go off on a mailing list rant.
Nov 25, 2018 at 11:04amWeb
Show threadAdonay Felipe NogueiraNov 27, 2018
@bob @diodelass All in all, strong auto-upgradable #copyleft is very important. The current license used by #Linux kernel, despite not auto-upgradable, is still good, but must improve. #Fuchsia means, according to Eben Moglen, the loss of opportunity to foster best-practices for providers to respect society across generations. @sflc @conservancy @fsf