Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 3, 2017 21:38 UTC (Mon) by aryonoco (guest, #55563)
In reply to: Fuchsia: a new operating system by pabs
Parent article: Fuchsia: a new operating system

You very well might, but Google, and the over a billion people whose Android phones are running outdated software with known root vulnerabilities due to the inability of chipset makers to update their drivers, would very much like to be able to use a system that can be properly updated, binary drivers or not.

Binary drivers are not going to go away. Qualcomm, Imagination Tech., MediaTek, Samsung all rely on closed binary drivers (and this will continue to do so due to patents). The question is not binary drivers vs open source mainline drivers, it is between binary drivers blobs in a kernel that cannot easily be updated, or binary blobs in a kernel that can be.

And Google, rightly in my opinion, is coming to the conclusion that the latter option is better.

Hence Fuchsia.

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Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 3, 2017 21:44 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Binary drivers are not going to go away. Qualcomm, Imagination Tech., MediaTek, Samsung all rely on closed binary drivers (and this will continue to do so due to patents).

You forgot to add "despite this being a violation of the GPL"

Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 4, 2017 2:40 UTC (Tue) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link]

Good luck enforcing that copyright infringement in court when most kernel developers don't think binary blobs are a GPL violation.

Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 11, 2017 10:19 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Binary drivers are not going to go away. Qualcomm, Imagination Tech., MediaTek, Samsung all rely on closed binary drivers (and this will continue to do so due to patents).

Except it looks like the next big bun-fight over patents could kill them (the software version) completely!

One of the biggest pro-software-patent Supreme Court Judges seems to have come to the conclusion that software patents are illogical and cannot be justified. I don't think he quite got there in the last judgement, but it seems as though he is trying to think things through logically, and when dealing with software patents he's suddenly realised he's got his logic in a mobius twist.

Cheers,
Wol