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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

The people who work on fuchsia are very good engineers - I’ve worked with many of them in person. But the project itself has always been a staff retention project. It only existed to keep said engineers from going to a competitor. I don’t know how any understanding of fuchsia is possible without this crucial fact

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A company might persue projects for all kinds of reasons.

As a research project to inform design design, as a long term bet and sure, for staff retention.

You have more insight, but it's sort of hard for me to see even Google put that many millions into an OS and, more importantly, put it into production usage on actual hardware (Nest) if that were the case.

One factor here is that Fuchsia is in direct competition with both Android and Chrome OS.

Maligning it as just a staff retention project might serve those teams quite well... either as a coping mechanism or as a political tool to kill it off.

This is not true and it’s odd people still take this bait voluntarily. At best this line used to be cheap PR to avoid GPL and Linux disciples going ballistic and to keep media off the project as much as possible.

They’ve shipped Fuchsia on a real product now - the Nest Hub - they have Chrome working on Fuchsia, and an Android syscall interface in the works.

They removed this line from the site, possibly since it read as provocative, but for a few recent years they had updated Fuchsia.dev with “Fuchsia is not a science experiment”. Anyways, Google has a tendency to scrap projects as we all know but I don’t know if the recent trends point in that direction just yet, but it is possible - the project lead did leave recently and reportedly Meta were going to use Fuchsia for an AR/VR platform and switched to Android, likewise Google.

If I were a CEO of a multi-bilion $ company, I would definitely put my best engineers on a long-term project like Fuchsia.

Google is one of few companies with capacity, capital and mindshare to make these kinds of projects.

Unlike Linux, Fuchsia is not under GPL. Another attempt at making Android less open.

>Unlike Linux, Fuchsia is not under GPL.

It's under MIT (the kernel Zircon specifically since comparing with Linux). Whether a license allowing even more freedom is worse is arguable.

I know - it provides google the freedom to lock down the OS further and the freedom to implement proprietary drivers.

Yay for arguable freedom.

I love the freedom Android provides what with the utter clusterfuck that is the Linux kernel’s driver interface and GPL. Yay freedom.

An MIT license is fine. Great, even, because Fuchsia is in fact still an open source OS.

Hardware OEM’s don’t owe the public transparent firmware blobs.

>the freedom to implement proprietary drivers

That exists already. Vast majority of Android devices require binary blobs in kernel for essential functionality.

> require binary blobs

That's the point. With something like fuchsia there can be entire closed forks of the kernel instead of having to blobs, making closed source easier to develop.

So I have, this isn't true except in a facile way—"it felt to me like they would have left otherwise." It shipped, in an important way.

What way? As an update to the least important possible device, that all users hate since it “crashes daily now”? Big way indeed.

I very much doubt you work at Google, and if you do, shame on you. This is quite an evil comment, thread, and line of thought.

None of what you're saying is true, you've gone for extreme hyperbole in every comment you've made, from Fuchsia being a "retention project", to the Nest Hub being the "least important device" to "all users hate it" "it crashes daily now."

Does that mean you don't believe it's going to replace Android/AOSP? It's in some Nest devices right now.

Android is being ported into Fuchsia,

https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/fuchsia

What is more likely to happen is to replace Linux with the Fuchsia infrastructure.

I'm sure in the next 10 years it will replace both Android and ChromeOS. Starting with ChromeOS first, then Android itself.

Otherwise, why is Fuchsia already running the Chrome web browser? [0]

[0] https://9to5google.com/2022/03/04/full-google-chrome-browser...

Right. This is what I think Fuchsia and Zircon probably are headed for long term but people really felt the compulsive contrarian need to stake out the experiment/retention project angle since so many saw the obvious but were hyperbolic about the timescale.

Not sure if it's ever feasible to replace Android (it's going to take at least a decade even assuming that Google becomes serious) but I think ChromeOS seems a reasonable target. It's not going to be as spectacular as Android but a decently successful migration if done properly. At that moment, I guess people can make more serious investments into Fuchsia.

Plausible real-world applications make it more effective as a "staff retention project", eh?

This seems like sour grapes.

It’s a compliment about the people and the fact that there isn’t a clear monetization path for an open source project is another good thing.

> It only existed to keep said engineers from going to a competitor.

Who in this day, and hour tries to make an OS as a commercial product?

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