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Comment by Despacito2019 | Hacker News Reader

Despacito2019

Thanks Google! This is the kind of good impact Google has on the OSS industry

Google literally killed Linux on consumer devices. They, on purpose, made every single produced phone non-compatible with Linux and made them Android-only to prevent any competition.

Now Purism has to reinvent a phone from scratch with automobile spare part (I.MX processors) and Pine64 have no choice but to use old & crappy SOCs.

THAT is the impact Google has on FOSS.

Surely that specific contribution is welcomed, but overall I don't think those company ever deserve any "thanks" from anyone given the harm they are doing to FLOSS, Competition, Privacy, Standards, and Society in general.

I'd love to see some sources for these claims.

While you're at it, how do you explain Chrome OS? That's still Linux and you even get a semi-native shell on it. It's almost completely open source and there's even a couple of distributions out there that are build on Chromium OS (which is the fully open source version) that's being used to give life to old laptops in schools. Almost all of the limitations of Chrome OS either arise from being a web-firest OS or for security reasons.

Even their new OS Fuchsia is being developed out in the open.

Android is now developed with the mainline kernel: https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/andro...

Android has been Linux, and it's even more Linux now than before.

They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their heart. It’s a pain in the butt to maintain out of tree changes. Getting code upstreamed means less maintenance work.

In my experience the types of developers building this stuff are personally fans of open source and companies are willing to let them submit upstream due to PR wins and limited downside.

So ? Upstream also benefits. Just because it's Google bring on every negative point of view

So? If it benefits OSS and Google, what do you care?

Companies, who make up a sizable portion of OSS commits, do it because their interests align. Why is this different, and suspicious or malicious?

So you're basically saying that all of OSS is primarily held together because the interests of various companies align somewhere?

Sounds perfect.

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