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Comment by ladyanita22 | Hacker News Reader

Redox is shaping up to be the most advanced OSS alternative to Linux apart from BSDs.

Yeah I've always written this off as a fun side project for a group of people but after seeing consistent updates and improvements over the last several years I've been so impressed by how far this project has been going.

I feel like I read that exact quote, 25+ years ago about Linux.

I admire these projects & the teams for their tenacity.

Four bells! Damn the torpedoes.

You might not be aware of Genode[0].

0. https://genode.org/

Genode looks interesting. As far as I understand it uses the sel4 kernel? Is it really in development since 2008?

It doesn't necessarily, but it can. Genode/SculptOS is kind of a microkernel OS framework, and it can use seL4 as the kernel.

Here is a talk about that porting effort:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N624i4X1UDw

Yes, it supports seL4 among a range of kernels.

Note the binaries are not specific to the kernel, so anything built for Genode will work on Genode systems of compatible ISA irrespective of kernel.

I am surprised to hear 2008, I could swear they have been active far longer. Maybe I am conflating it with TUD:OS.

They are indeed quite active. Just see their backlog of release notes. They release 4 times a year, on the clock, and always document what they've done.

I feel like MIT license will prevent this from ever becoming a linux alternative unless of course they switch to something more sane later on.

There's nothing insane about MIT. It may not be your preference, but that's not the same as insane.

I am not native speaker but saying something is more sane doesn't mean the person means/thinks other option is insane (which is the extreme on the scale).

It can mean both of the options might be sane (reasonable) one is just more reasonable. It might also mean both of the options are insane (unreasonable) one is just less so.

other licenses being more sane doesn't imply MIT is _insane_ per se. It's just not a very sane option for cooperation and has a very real posibility of driving someone insane. Imagine working on redoxos for years with your friends and then Microsoft takes your work, rebrands it as Windows 19, completely steals all of the market from you and silences you through legal pressure without even crediting your work. All of this is very much possible and similar scenarios have happened before.

MIT is for education not cooperation.

Linux didn't win because it was GPL'd, it won because it was the only real alternative back in '92. The BSDs were all caught up in the moronic SCO lawsuits of the time, otherwise we'd all be using FreeBSD or some other 386BSD variant today instead of Linux. The GPL was a nice bonus but it isn't the real secret sauce that has powered Linux's growth, it was mostly good timing.

That doesn't mean that I'd rather see some form of copyleft in place (like the MPLv2) or at least a licence with some kind of patent protection baked in (like the Apache 2.0), the X11/MIT licences are extremely weak against patent trolls

The short window of opportunity that had opened up around 1992 certainly was a precondition for Linux success.

That we have Linux as we have it today is the result of

- being under GPL

- having a large enough and diverse enough group of contributors to make re-licensing practically impossible

- no CLA, no Copyright assignment

None of the competition on the embedded space of FOSS operating systems, including Linux Foundation Zephyr, makes use of GPL.

Unfortunely the license is seen as tainted by all businesses, and plenty of OSes are already seen as Linux alternative in some spaces.

In others Android is the only being used, where the only thing left from GPL is the Linux kernel itself, and only because Fuchsia kind of went nowhere, besides some kitchen devices.

Fuchsia?

Fuchsia, or Zicron kernel to be specific, is pretty much dead since the last layoff of Google

Aww fudge. We kooked.

If it's dead, why is it moving so much? https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+log

As of writing this, last commit 45 seconds ago. On the other hand, if you scan the names, it’s like 5 of the same people.

I agree, can’t say “dead” but it is a Google project so it’s like being born with a terminal condition.

Right now it’s looking like 6-7 commits per hour… it’s not nothing

It's far more active than redox and it's actually running on real consumer devices. There are more than a hundred monthly active committers on the repo you were looking at, and that's not the only repo fuchsia has. Calling it dead or prone to dying is simply not based on any objective reality.

Okay, I take that back. Maybe I shouldn't say it is dead, but it is more on life support, where there is no new features being developed. Simply put, it is dead to me not that the project ceased to function, but dead to me in the sense that it is out of relevancy, just like Hong Kong.

What are the 100+ daily commits doing if not adding new features? Google is not spending any effort marketing the roadmap for the project, but it's very much still alive and in active development. There are RFCs published fairly often about technical designs for various problems being solved and you can see lots of technical discussions happening via code review.

Some new things that I can think of off the top of my head: * More complete support for linux emulation via starnix. * Support for system power management * Many internal platform improvements including a completely overhauled logging system that uses shared memory rather than sockets

Most project happenings are not that interesting to the average person because operating system improvements are generally boring, at least at the layers fuchsia primarily focuses on. If you've worked in the OS space, a lot of things fuchsia is doing is really cool though.

I heard a rumour that the Fuchsia project would be where Google put people they don't need at the moment but think are too valuable to lay off.

Fuchsia is literally a Google project to avoid using Linux.

Look at their other "Open Source" projects like Android to understand why they would want to ensure they would avoid GPL code. It's all about control, and appearances of OS through gaslighting by source available.

Fuchsia would be far more valuable to everyone, including Google, if multiple parties participated in its development. If control was all that was desired, a hard fork of Linux would have made more sense. GPL doesn't compel companies to work with upstream. Just because you don't understand why fuchsia exists doesn't mean you need to invent fiction about it. Is it hard to believe there might be technical advantages to an alternative architecture to Linux and that a company might be willing to invest in trying to bring that innovation to the world?

Interesting! Can you elaborate?

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