So… Google’s plan to rid itself of GPL’d dependencies moves one step further.
At what point are we going to call out Google for doing the “popular” embrace, extend, extinguish act?
At what point are we going to call out Google for doing the “popular” embrace, extend, extinguish act?
I thought that what Microsoft did to WSL was the first indicator of Embrace and Extend of Linux. I guess Linux was always 'used' as the testing bed for the giants for creating their own closed ecosystems.
Hardly surprising that Fuchsia exists for the same reason; as I previously predicted.
- Solaris LX-branded zones;
- Microsoft WSL1;
- Google gVisor;
- Amazon Firecracker.
None of above done anything groundbreaking (other than ditching GPL). Why would you think LX-branded Fuchsia would?
Plus, you have various [LSM]s as a safety net. Android was an early adopter of SELinux, and latest releases still use it.
I distinctly remember ad companies using various tricks like reading /proc and the like to try and get information about what applications are running on a phone and what servers they are communicating with without asking for perms (it's fixed now, but it used to be a thing years ago). This is the kind of stuff that fuchsia should, in theory, prevent.
Refer to Genode Handbook for a decent definition and examples.
seL4 is formally proven to enforce capabilities.
Genode is, and should be reasonably easy to test on a regular PC, via bootable usb stick.
It can be quite confusing to use at first, as capabilities have GUI representation.
There's a blog[0] and some introductory video[1].
Can it be forced to?
> it loses all permissions normally associated with its controlling user, with the exception of "capabilities" it already has in the form of file descriptors.
What if we want to grant an app already running a new capability on the fly? E.g. I imagine a case of user opening a file in a GUI app as an OS-level file selection dialog getting invoked (provided the app already has a capability to invoke it, as by the manifest) and producing a capability for the app to access the file the user choosse in an explicitly specified (RO or R/W) mode.
The OS as a control point for where software can be installed and used is increasingly less relevant. It's increasingly about controlling the application stores and maximizing their reach rather than the OS platforms. Mobile is actually lagging behind these trends a bit; mostly because of draconian app store policies discouraging/forbidding anything that is "not native".
It will be interesting to see if Fuchsia will get a lot of adoption outside of Google. I'm very skeptical about their ability to convince others to use this. Even their strategy around Fuchsia remains murky. E.g. their whole IOT strategy resembles what they are doing with messaging in terms of quickly abandoned things that they announce with a lot of fanfare every year. One of these train wrecks is Nest, which they picked as a niche player guinea pig for the first commercial rollout of Fuchsia. I doubt it will move the needle for Nest. Or for Fuchsia.
Might be worth remarking that (historically, and AFAIK also currently) Docker on Windows and Mac used a Linux VM under the hood.