Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Sep 2, 2015 14:09 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors by nye
Parent article: Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

While what you say is plausible on its face, Google bought Android Inc ten years ago (July 2005), two years before anything was publicly revealed (November 2007), and more than three years before anything was made commercially available (October 2008 with the HTC Dream running Android 1.0)

During those years, Google made many, many, many changes to the platform definition, but despite their massive effort to replace all other GPL components (even a new libc!), they chose to heavily modify Linux instead of making similar changes to another kernel.

Since then, Linux's feature and performance gap versus other Free kernels has only grown larger. (For all the complaining about how Linux's ARM stuff is a ginormous mess, everyone else is far, far worse...)

Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Sep 2, 2015 14:35 UTC (Wed) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link] (1 responses)

There are many FSF-type guys inside Google; so this choice might have been affected by their religious approach to the matter. Other vendors shipped BSD kernels on non-x86 consumer hardware within that time frame and it worked well.

Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Sep 2, 2015 14:46 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> There are many FSF-type guys inside Google; so this choice might have been affected by their religious approach to the matter. Other vendors shipped BSD kernels on non-x86 consumer hardware within that time frame and it worked well.

That explanation doesn't fly, because Google went well out of their way to replace (and in many cases, create from scratch) alternatives to *every* other traditionally GPL component of a Linux system.

Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Sep 3, 2015 11:46 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>During those years, Google made many, many, many changes to the platform definition, but despite their massive effort to replace all other GPL components (even a new libc!), they chose to heavily modify Linux instead of making similar changes to another kernel.

Well, you've sort of countered your own point there: after two years of heavy modifications, switching kernel would have increased the time to market by enough that Android might never have taken off. All of the other components were much more readily replaceable, either with drop-in replacements already existing, or by developing their own in tandem (based at least partly on BSD code, as it turned out), but the kernel was the largest and most specialised part.

I'm certainly not convinced (or trying to claim) that, given the choice from step zero, Google would definitely not have chosen Linux. I am convinced however that by the time Google bought Android it was already far enough along that changing the OS it's built on would have been commercial suicide for the project, and that Android doesn't therefore make a good example of Google's choices, because I don't believe they really had one.

Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Sep 3, 2015 13:56 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> that Android doesn't therefore make a good example of Google's choices, because I don't believe they really had one.

Sure they did, they could have not bought Android and went somewhere else, or started their own in-house because they certainly got a good look at the technology stack and roadmap as part of due diligence before purchasing the company. Google has invested a lot in the Linux kernel, not just in Android, over the years so it is still a good fit for the company, they have (and had at the time) a lot more Linux kernel expertise than BSD, even if in many cases what they run on top of the Linux kernel is Google proprietary.