Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 16 Aug 2014 16:10:04 -0500 | Subject | Re: OT: Open letter to the Linux World | From | Rob Landley <> |
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On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Vlad Glagolev <stealth@tiberian.ru> wrote: > Now what do we see? Complete degradation of Linux-like ecosystem. I'm
Nah, lots of embedded guys value simplicity and a modular design where you can swap actually out parts. Check out the musl-libc.org mailing list for example. Those mailing lists are the place for this sort of thing, this isn't.
Way back when I wrote mdev instead of accepting udev, and I plan to do some kind of "lunchd" in toybox (loosely based on launchd but not crazy stuff like xml config files) as part of my project to make android self-hosting, which I gave a talk about last year:
video: http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0 outline: http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt
Keep in mind that mainframes and minicomputers got kicked up into the server space by the PC, and now smartphones are kicking the PC up there. The fight between Amazon's PC cloud and IBM big iron servers is exactly the same fight IBM's mainframes and DEC's minicomputers fought 25 years ago. Last time DEC lost, this time IBM is losing, but it doesn't matter to the rest of us.
Plug your phone into a USB hub, add a USB keyboard, USB mouse, and USB to VGA (or with USB3 a USB to HDMI) adapter, and you've got the hardware of a development workstation. The software side we're working on, but it won't be the current pile of PC userspace for the same reason the PC didn't run MVS or VMS. Technological disruption goes _upmarket_, not down.
Android has a no GPL in userspace policy, so nothing systemd does has any impact on the _billion_ seat android market. Among other things, if a company adds GPL software to Android they violate the Android trademark licensing guidelines and can't call the result "android". But toybox is public domain, musl is BSD licensed, they can add _our_ stuff no problem.
Fighting over the desktop market in 2014 is like Unix fighting over the minicomputer and RISC workstation market in 1994. It doesn't _matter_. Sure the modern equivalent of cobol programmers will make plenty of money servicing entrenched fortune 500 fossils in that space, but the rest of us can ignore it and focus on what will replace it instead.
And that's highly unlikely to include a GPL'd systemd. Busybox predates android and they're _still_ not using it. Good luck waiting them out...
Rob
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