Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by abarth on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:59PM (#25348970)

As a principal software engineer that works on Fuchsia, I can assure you that the project does not exist solely to retain me. :)

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by raphlinus on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:58PM (#25349815)

Congrats on the promo! It didn't quite retain me either, but I was a lowly staff software engineer. I am returning to Google though (back to the Google Fonts team), and it's entirely possible we'll get a chance to work together again.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by dewitt on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:47PM (#25350376)

Yay! Welcome back!

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by abarth on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:10PM (#25349945)

I look forward to it!

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by swetland on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:36PM (#25349515)

Congrats on the promo! It didn't retain me (though I didn't get promoted to Principal, so maybe I don't count) but I did enjoy working on Fuchsia. Nice to see much of the syscall design seems to have survived.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by abarth on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:39PM (#25349548)

Thanks! Yes, your ideas are alive and well in the project.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by suchire on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:30PM (#25349408)

Not solely, but in part? ;-)

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by baybal2 on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:07PM (#25349909)

Adam, how much were you involved in drafting this manifest?

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by abarth on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:13PM (#25349969)

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean by "this manifest." The blog post linked above was written by Wayne Piekarski, who is a Developer Advocate for Fuchsia. My role in the project is as a software engineer.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by asadawadia on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:53PM (#25350461)

What was your journey to principal?

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by jacobush on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:03PM (#25349043)

... but also your colleagues?

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by wmf on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:45PM (#25349634)

Since you're here, "abarth", it took me several clicks to get to the OWNERS file and all I saw was a list of email addresses. Calling that "governance" is... could we at least get some names and maybe brief bios on these people?

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by evil-olive on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:58PM (#25350530)

The OWNERS file is typically used, sometimes by automated tooling, to answer the "who should I ask to code review these changes?" question.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/c...

https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/creat...

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/code_owners.html

It's not meant to be a place for developer bios. If for no other reason than one developer could appear in many OWNERS files scattered throughout a repo, or in multiple repos, and keeping the bio current across all of them would be a nightmare.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by wmf on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @03:45PM (#25351115)

Let me add some context. I was looking at the governance links on the site and found https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/eng_co... which at the bottom simply says "The current members of the Fuchsia Eng Council are listed in this OWNERS file." I think it would improve the transparency/accountability of the project to have more than a list of email addresses here.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by asadlionpk on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @01:22AM (#25355896)

Probably not in the OWNERS file though, as it’s a machine-consumable file, heavy used inside and outside google for automation.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by abarth on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:56PM (#25349785)

I understand where you're coming from, but that ends up being an inclusion issue in the project. I'm comfortable having my name and bio "out there" on the Internet, but I recognize that's a privilege. Not everyone who contributes to the project will be comfortable doing that.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by gowld on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @05:27PM (#25352310)

The Eng Council is 5 people in a position of governance, not everyone who contributes.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by abarth on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @05:44PM (#25352538)

Ah, I didn't realize the comment above was about the Eng Council. I'll raise the issue at our next meeting. Thanks!

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by PragmaticPulp on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:44PM (#25350332)

> I've heard Fuchsia referred to as a "principal engineer retention project" at Google.

No rational company is going to create useless projects just to retain expensive engineers. What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pay them to work on something without expected ROI?

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by com2kid on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @05:09PM (#25352069)

> No rational company is going to create useless projects just to retain expensive engineers. What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pay them to work on something without expected ROI?

(Short) story time!

Windows on ARM was a solo pet project of a high level engineer at Microsoft!

There are some engineers who are so valuable that letting them spend non-trivial amounts of time on whatever they want is a very good use of company resources.

Sometimes just not letting the competition have them is valuable!

I've worked with a few 10x-20x engineers, if someone is that productive, they can spend 2 years off on another non-ROI project, come back, and spend 2 years on a project with ROI, and the company still comes out ahead.

Most company's aren't smart enough to figure this out, then again determining who these people are is also a problem. That latter part is funny (ironic?), because on the ground floor everyone who encounters a world class engineer is pretty darn sure of it.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by gman83 on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @05:52PM (#25352638)

I don't think it's fair to call Windows on ARM an "engineer retention project". They actually released Windows RT and tried very hard to make it work. They still have it going with the Surface Pro X, and they just announced an emulation layer to get x64 applications working on ARM, which if it works well would solve RT's biggest problem, a lack of legacy applications: https://www.neowin.net/news/it039s-official-x64-emulation-is...

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by anp on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @08:18PM (#25354111)

My possibly incorrect read of GP is that it started as effectively a retention project until someone realized they really wanted it.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by com2kid on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @02:35PM (#25363363)

That is correct. It was a one man show for a long time (I don't think it was his only job, just a side project), then when tablets happened a full team was ramped up behind it.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by munificent on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @11:43PM (#25355449)

> What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pay them to work on something without expected ROI?

I'm not claiming that Google or other companies often do this, but just to play Devil's advocate, here are reasons why they might:

* Prevents them from going to the competition.

* Uses their prestige to attract or retain other developers.

* Keeps them "on retainer" in case a hard problem that needs their rare skills appears in the future.

When I worked at EA, we had a star engineer that spent, like, 75% of his time totally dicking around on whatever he felt like. But when say, it was a month away from FIFA's ship date and they couldn't get the game to run faster than 5 FPS, they would call him in. He would work some magic, the game would ship on time and with adequate perf, and he'd return to goofing off. Well worth EA's money to keep him on salary.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by cmrdporcupine on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @07:34PM (#25353698)

The rationale behind decisions in a BigCorp with very large Other Revenue Sources is entirely different from that of a small company that could be crushed by market forces on a moments notice.

As others have pointed out, the ROI can be something entirely different than $$ in the accounting ledger.

9 years into my BigCorp career and I still find it flabbergasting.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by incrudible on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:55PM (#25350476)

The ROI is keeping your competition from the bottom starved for engineers.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by dbbk on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:50PM (#25350410)

I wouldn't say it's a useless project per se. But the usefulness of it is certainly yet to be determined.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by hobs on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:55PM (#25350477)

Punishing your competitors and maybe making money.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by ponker on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:45PM (#25350348)

So they are available when you have a project to ramp up quickly, and so they don’t work at a competitor.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by epage on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:18PM (#25350014)

For all on this thread involved, thank you!

Since I was got into programming in middle school, I was obsessed with OS design (yeah, reading the source code for L4 in high school). As I went further in my education, I felt the landscape was pretty stagnate at this point and went into other areas (initially driver development and now developer tooling).

While I've not had a chance to jump over to Fuschia to participate, it warms my heart to see the development going on.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by bestorworse on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @03:13PM (#25350720)

When looking more closely on Fuchsia architecture you might well be back into OS design obsession. As the kernel is, IMHO strongly based on a microkernel design, the OS APIs presents itself as userspace APIs. They are in fact, defined by what the userspace implements. And there is a lot of freedom on how to implement this API.

The majority of microkernel based OSes just implement these APIs to emulate UNIX APIs and that IMHO is a waste of potential but understandable in order to be backward compatible and not have to develop whole new userspace applications from scratch.

But I really like Fuchsia's take on the design of this userspace and the way the 'capability security model' is integrated into it. The amount of APIs built into the base 'Fuchsia platform' really blurs the line between and OS and a stack with OS plus essential services. Today, IMHO, things like automatic updates, software distribution, crash reports, and other low level application centric facilities should really be provided by the OS and that is done in the base Fuchsia platform.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by fh973 on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:18PM (#25349254)

This also how golang started, but doesn't mean it won't develop a life of its own.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by zbowling on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:28PM (#25350125)

I think the quote was _senior_ engineer retention project" and that was many years ago :)

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by Kinrany on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:26PM (#25348410)

I wonder if this could be turned into a better way to fund public research.

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Re:Expanding Fuchsia's open source model by notatoad on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @12:34PM (#25348553)

i've definitely heard that said before here on HN. are you hearing it referred to that way internally at google?

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