Lost you already. Since Fuchsia uses a pushover license instead of a copyleft license, the vendors' drivers aren't going to be open source. Look how many companies today don't open-source their Linux drivers, and they're breaking the law by not doing so. It's going to be so much worse when there's "nothing" wrong with keeping them proprietary.
This is great term for it, thank you.
So, when an open source driver exists, Fuschia will make it useful for a long time.
Further its entirely possible for a device to require signed drivers and their is even a security incentive to doing so. They don't have to ever let you have your own drivers for their hardware.
Hardware running software that is either proprietary or based on permissively licensed software is everywhere. It's usually impractical or impossible to run your own software on such devices. There is no particular reason to trust Google any more than any other big company. Corporate persons judged by the moral standards one would apply to people are nearly always bad people even wherein most of the people therein are OK to good. Trusting them beyond their own self interest is nearly always a mistake.
Therefore, your criticism is completely without merit, and should be ignored entirely.
1) Fuschia doesn't have a property. (It doesn't compel hardware vendors to provide open source drivers.)
2) No other operating system can possibly have that property either.
3) Therefore Fuschia should die, to help one of those other operating systems succeed.
Do you not see the flaw in this argument?
As an alternative I suggest you look at actual Linux devices even if they are objectively worse if they are more open.
Linux has not compelled Nvidia to produce good OpenGL drivers.
No, really, walk me through this.
I think the principal is that if Google had licensed Fuchsia in such a way as to require release of source code to kernel modules that companies would rightly fear being sued for violating the copyright of a mega corp like google in a way that GPL violators don't fear say the free software foundation.
I think this proves GP's point.
You wonder if you can install a new android or other Linux based OS can be installed on your hardware unfortunately no gpu drivers exist for Linux so again you are forced to give up. The only software you can run is the official software from your OEM. In theory the OS you run is open source but if anyone who isn't a major OEM builds an alternative version it works as expected without proprietary bits and binaries signed by the manufacturer your device wont talk to your email provider, your bank, netflix, spotify. Instead of free as in beer or free as in libre its free as in bullcrap.
The point is without the onus being on OEMs to provide source for their drivers people have only as many options as OEM's opt to give them.
Creating a new OS, that is also GPL will not encourage Nvidia more to do the thing they already aren't doing.
I'd love to see a list of the problems you have with Fuschia or how Fuschia is being managed. Maybe as a new top-level post on HN?
An open source driver written once will work for all future versions of Fuschia. Right? That reduces the effort for open source developers enormously.
Most security flaws come in above the driver level. Right? Being able to update the OS, despite the hardware manufacturer's laziness, is a huge boon for everyone.
Fuschia is open source. Drivers written for one Fuschia (say, the one Google controls) should work for another Fuschia (say, the one you and your friend forked.) Right? That's a huge win for you.
Whatever incentives you have imagined that hardware manufacturers have, time has proven those incentives don't work. It's far better to take as much control away from them as possible. They will do the minimum amount of work necessary (write new drivers). Then we can all exploit the hardware + driver + Fuschia system.
It has always, and will always, be possible to build propriety drivers. This is minimizing the blast radius of them never being updated, as much as possible.
For these reasons and more, we should all hope Fuschia is successful.
The Android developers who have tried to live on top of Linux are sick of the problems that Linux brings them. Fuschia is an open source direct response to those limitations. It's stunning to me that you would wish them to fail.
"then any improvement that could be added to Fuschia could be added to Linux". Explain to me why we still have BSD? Not all problems are solved by Linux. The sooner you accept that, the better off we will all be.
It's like you're wishing Clang would die, because we can always just improve GCC. That's demonstrably false. Just like saying everything good in Fuschia can be added to Linux. No, it can't.
"We don't need a new operating system whose only advantage is that it's easier to write proprietary drivers."
Wait, if it's easier to write propriety drivers, doesn't that lower the barrier to making low-cost phones? Well, Christ, sign me up. Do you have any idea how many billion people have a low-cost smart phone as their first computing device? If we lower the cost even more, that will broaden the reach even more.
Do you seriously not get that the other major phone OS is completely closed source? Maybe put a little faith in the people who have developed the most successful competing operating system that's open source?