LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Posted Sep 4, 2014 19:55 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953)
In reply to: LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive by eru
Parent article: LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Actually I see it the other way. ARM should be thanking god for Linus. Without Linux being developed ARM would have never went anywhere. Its the power of Linux that makes these chips viable IMO. Without Linux ARM would need someone like Microsoft to come in and bless the platform and provide the OS. I don't think the suggestion that BSD would have filled the void is appropriate, there are far too many developers that simply won't contribute if someone can take that code proprietary.

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LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Posted Sep 4, 2014 22:44 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

Mutual benefit, certainly. But ARM does have iOS, QNX, even Windows. It has advantages over Intel for mobile devices - narrowing now, but the gap in power consumption was significant earlier.

LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Posted Sep 6, 2014 9:47 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (2 responses)

Except that iOS and Windows only run on specially crafted ARM platforms.

LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Posted Sep 7, 2014 2:38 UTC (Sun) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

And were only developed because ARM had immense success because of Linux. Apple would have embraced it for sure, they were after all involved in the origination of ARM but without the immense success ARM has had because of Linux I doubt they would be as large or ubiquitous as they are now.

LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Posted Sep 7, 2014 18:57 UTC (Sun) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

The ARM platform has been in a large amount of hardware way before Linux was even ported into it. Cars, computer parts, watches etc have used ARMS since 1985 and the ARM chip was shipping at much larger numbers of CPUs compared to Intel and other manufacturers since the mid to late 1990s.

Linux had nothing to do with that.. The market that ARM is known for now (small units like beaglebone etc) is large because of Linux but in numbers shipped they are immensely tiny compared to overall ARM usage.

LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Posted Sep 15, 2014 19:22 UTC (Mon) by TimSmall (guest, #96681) [Link] (1 responses)

> ARM should be thanking god for Linus.

IMO, probably they should be thanking Russell King as much:

http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/docs/history.php

... this was all done in 1995, in his spare time whilst he did his undergraduate degree. To give some context to that, the A5000 which he targeted launched with a spec of a 25MHz ARM2 and 1/2/4MB RAM and either a 40MB hard disk, or no-hard-disk (floppy disk as the only storage).

Incidentally, Russell was a terrible person to have in your high school computer club - he was very knowledgeable and helpful, but he set the bar so high that I nearly took an entirely different career path...

When I found out a few years later that he'd ported Linux to the ARM essentially single-handedly, I felt a lot better.

LuneOS tries to keep webOS alive

Posted Sep 15, 2014 19:47 UTC (Mon) by TimSmall (guest, #96681) [Link]

Sorry, that should have said 25MHz ARM3. Later a 33MHz ARM3 version was made available, upgradeable to 8MB RAM.