nice?

It's on most of the smartphones on the planet. Plus it is the dominant server OS. Plus in the top 3 in many embedded categories (a highly diverse set of technologies)

In context, it should be clear that kernel development is a niche.

> It's on most of the smartphones on the planet.

Sadly enough, probably not for long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(operating_system)

Haha, I heard another good one about a nun going into a bar..

Even if Fuchsia is crapware, Google has the money to keep polishing that ball of mud, and eventually force it as the new version of Android, quality be damned. The rest of the world will have no recourse but to switch. It will be painful for quite a while, but people will survive. I mean, people survive using Windows, and not enough people switch away from that, either.

I’m not saying that Fuchsia is necessarily bad, I’m saying that Google will do anything to get away from GPL code, including, if necessary, forcing Android to Fuchsia. It doesn’t actually matter if Fuchsia is any good.

From what I can see, the Fuchsia kernel is actually quite interesting. I like the foci on (1) capabilities and (2) message passing. It's not the most innovative thing in the known universe - in fact both of those concepts are of pretty late-80s-to-early-90s vintage, from the OOP boom when programmers were misspending their ill-gotten performance gains[0] – but they make a degree of sense. The userspace bits I'm less sure about. Like you say, it seems to be a non-GPL-ed clone of Linux. It's the kind of thing I'd expect of some cheap Chinese company. This kind of fragmentation is emphatically not a good thing for our industry and Google knows it, and I very much hope they don't get away with it, but I suspect its being a clone is exactly why it'll be a very easy transition to force on end-users. Programmers will never in a million years use it on the server side, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

> Programmers will never in a million years use it on the server side, though.

Why not? Certain people are using microkernels, for christsakes. Why not Fuschia on the server?

The biggest obstacle might be drivers. A “server” is defined more loosely than “an Android phone”. An Android phone manufacturer has the incentive to make sure that drivers for that hardware exist in Android, regardless if Android is Linux-based or Fuchsia-based. And Google can make Android switch to Fuchsia, and therefore can control where that incentive leads. Google, however, does not control what runs on servers, and server hardware manufacturers know that if they don’t have a driver in Linux, they won’t sell very much of their hardware, since existing hardware run Linux-based systems.

I meant to say "unikernel." Don't know where that brain fart came from!

> Google, however, does not control what runs on servers, and server hardware manufacturers know that if they don’t have a driver in Linux, they won’t sell very much of their hardware, since existing hardware run Linux-based systems.

I'm not sure if "It's the way things are" is quite the argument its made out to be. Some server hardware is beginning to look more and more like a phone/Chromebook. And things do change. "Not in a million years" was the argument made against Linux compared to the traditional enterprise UNIX vendors and where are they now?

If Linux developers are actually afraid of that, then they should simply switch the license away from the GPL, or dual license it, or do anything else than what they're currently doing.

You might not know, but it’s commonly held not to be practially possible to switch the license of Linux, since its copyright is not owned by a single entity – it is owned in myriads of small portions depending on who wrote that piece. Some of those people have since passed away, their copyrights now being held by their descendants.

Yes I know, I've heard that a lot and it's a weak and harmful comment that kernel people should absolutely not be making. It actually pains me to see it typed again. You don't actually want a software project to be like that, it makes it very difficult to enforce the license when it actually needs to be enforced because you can't get consensus from all the copyright holders. It also increases the risk that some copyright holder (like one of those descendents) goes rogue and you have another Patrick McHardy situation.

If there really was enough reason and will to do it, they would just track down those people, or they would remove that code and replace it with something else. Just like they've done every time in the past when there was copyright problems. Just like any other big open source project has done when licensing became a problem.

It might or might not be a good idea in general to not have a centralized copyright holder entity, but at least it cuts down on the humongous license flame wars, which, incidentally, is what you would get if you actually wanted to go through with an endeavor such as you describe.

Anyway, what Linux developers might be afraid of can not be mitigated by simply switching to an MIT license. What would happen is basically some modern variant of this:

https://lwn.net/Articles/162686/

I think you're talking about users and they're talking about engineers.

Android Linux !== Linux.