We’ve been talking about Google’s mysterious Fuchsia operating system for a while now, and today, we have a new piece of the puzzle. It’s a small piece, for sure, but with Google being so incredibly secretive about the whole thing, we take what we can get. As it turns out, Google has added support for its Pixelbook to Fuchsia, and added a page on how to prepare the Pixelbook for Fuchsia installation, and you can check the how-to commit for information about the installation itself.
Still a far cry from anything even remotely tangible about where Fuchsia is going, but even a slow drip can eventually fill a bucket.
And more about Fuchsia you can find at
https://fuchsia.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page
The imnportant parts there are
– a precompiled binary of the kernel, which can run on Windows with QEmu
– precompiled Armadillo-GUI for smartphones with Android and
– the analysis of the fuchsia kernel at Hacktivity by Attila Szász and GergÅ‘ Hosszú.
It is maybe too early to tell, yet the release of instructions specific to only the Pixelbook would suggest that Google is also taking a path of forced obsolescence for their devices:
No support for Android Apps for the Pixel 2013.
No recipe/support for Fuchsia for the Pixel 2013, Pixel 2015, and Pixel C even though none of these devices have reached their official end-of-life (at least five years after their release).
And finally, is the aim of Google to ultimately replace both Android and ChromeOS with a single unified operating system not based on Linux?
Google has been removing GPL software from Android, the latest victim being GCC.
Linux only got lucky because *BSD was busy fighting a lawsuit, and companies love MIT license.
Microsoft loves the MIT-license.
Google uses for Android the Apache 2.0 license,
for Fuchsia the BSD-3-Clause license
amd for Chromium some parts under the Apache 2.0 license and some parts under the BSD-3-Clause license.
(Only the kernel of Fuchsia is under the MIT-license, because is is dereived from LittleKernel)
Apache uses for Swift the Apache 2.0 license,
for the XNU-Kernel its Apple Public License 2.0,
CUPS under the Apache 2.0, etc.
The often used LLVM is under the BSD 3-clause license.
I am a bit puzzled by the jump from a mention of earlier devices apparently being left behind by Google with the Fuchsia project to a discussion of open source software licenses.