
Why Is Google Building a New Operating System from Scratch? - bertazure
https://www.fastcompany.com/3063006/why-on-earth-is-google-building-a-new-operating-system-from-scratch?_utm_source=1-2-2
======
CryoLogic
As a Google Fi user, who frequently gets relevant ads immediately after
talking about a product on the phone (voice call) with my girlfriend - I do
fear a world where Google controls the OS.

Once I also mentioned some tv's I was interested in (not on the phone, but in
the same room as the phone) and also got ads right afterwards. I do not know
if it was related to an app open or the phone itself, but a scary invasion of
privacy nonetheless.

~~~
microwavecamera
Holy crap that is weird. Well I won't be using Google Fi. I was reading Fi's
Terms of Service and came across this gem:

 _We take protecting your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI”
very seriously._

 _Using CPNI without your additional approval is limited to specific purposes.
By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to
your CPNI without your additional approval only for the following limited
purposes:_

...

 _Any other purpose permitted by federal law_

So they can use your personal data without your approval for anything that's
not illegal? Spurious use of the word "limited" there Google.

~~~
infogulch
Wait, if that's a limited list, why is there anything listed before
"everything not illegal" at all? Are there other things they do that _are_
illegal? Or is that just designed to confuse and mask the last item?

~~~
infogulch
It's stupid. The whole section could be rewritten as just:

 _By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to
your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI” without your
additional approval for any purpose permitted by federal law_

I just read it myself, that's essentially what it says. The whole privacy
section is just garbage filler to distract you from that, unless I'm reading
it completely wrong.

~~~
alexanderdmitri
I wonder why it's permitted by Federal law for a corporate entity to write
legal notices in such a way that is limited to, in most cases, leading the
user to believe something is being asserted via highly contrived prolixity
when in fact the assertion is entirely void of any substance outside of the
tacit acknowledgement from the entity issuing the notice that there will be no
breach of notoriously vague Federal law unless the lawyers working for the
entity, who (in so many words) actually authored the notice in the first
place, see a loophole through which they believe they can exonerate their
client without needlessly causing their client's PR firm to work overtime
especially in cases where the aforementioned lack of substance is purposefully
placed over the purpose of the notice, which may be defined, but is not
definitively limited to meaning, the entity will more or less use the data of
the notified person, who may or may not be misled by traditionally sound
intuition as well as the insubstantial notice being described to believe that
his or her actions upon the entity's platform are private, as currency, thus
leveraging the intimate knowledge of the disoriented, albeit notified, person
to manipulate thoughts, desires, and actions (not to mention internal and
external perception in general) towards any and all ends the entity dictates
based on fiduciary goals and its incommensurable and entropic drive to further
consolidate control of a market the entity continues to cultivate and grow
beyond all reasonable proportion.

------
6d6b73
Why? Here is why:

gOS#> dmesg

Grow with Google ads - Get your ad on Google today‎
Adwww.google.com/AdWords‎(888) 971-0642 Reach your customers in the moments
that matter. Learn more now. Styles: Search Ads, Banner Ads, Video Ads, Mobile
Ads, App Ads Services: Google AdWords, AdWords Express, Google Display
Network, YouTube Video Ads, Google M

[15978.846183] PM: Preparing system for mem sleep

[15978.846447] (NULL device *): firmware: direct-loading firmware
iwlwifi-6000g2a-6.ucode

[15978.846461] Freezing user space processes ... (elapsed 0.015 seconds) done.

[15978.861750] Freezing remaining freezable tasks ... (elapsed 0.001 seconds)
done.

[15978.862917] PM: Entering mem sleep

Grow with Google ads - Get your ad on Google today‎
Adwww.google.com/AdWords‎(888) 971-0642 Reach your customers in the moments
that matter. Learn more now. Styles: Search Ads, Banner Ads, Video Ads, Mobile
Ads, App Ads Services: Google AdWords, AdWords Express, Google Display
Network, YouTube Video Ads, Google M

~~~
microwavecamera
gOS#> ls ~

File list brought to you by Walmart.com - Get ready for Back to School with
low prices on school supplies like Laptops, Backpacks, Calculators, School
Uniforms, Notebooks and Dorm Furniture. Free 2 day shipping.

Desktop Documents Downloads Music Pictures Videos

gOS#>

~~~
jacquesm

      gOS#> vi /home/jam/todo.txt
    
      Quota of ads clicked not reached for the time of day.
    
      gOS#>

~~~
kalleboo

      gOS#> vim /home/jam/todo.txt
    
      This looks like a request from a bot! Please complete this CAPTCHA:

~~~
mywittyname

        [ ] I am not a robot

------
spodek
> _Unix got its start as a volunteer project with no organizational
> recognition from Bell Labs, and Linus Torvalds started working on Linux as a
> hobby._

I'm not Richard Stallman, but I consider it worth mentioning the middle steps
of GNU and the GPL that gave the hobby a useful endpoint.

~~~
ekianjo
Linus only worked on the kernel, the coreutils from GNU were developed way,
way earlier. Of course one cannot go without the other, but RMS and the folks
behind GNU certainly deserve to be mentioned. Note that Linux had no clear
license at the beginning and RMS influenced Linus to have it under GPL2 - that
was the right decision at the time.

~~~
nialv7
I thought Linus chose to use GPL2 himself?

Can you back your statement up?

~~~
ekianjo
> “I may not have seen the light,” writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman’s
> 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to
> the GPL. “But I guess something from his speech sunk in.”

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_2.0/Chapte...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_2.0/Chapter_09)

I claimed RMS influenced Linus, but I did not mean he did it by talking to him
personally.

------
blacksmith_tb
Needs a [2016] doesn't it? Not that Fuschia isn't interesting...

~~~
paulddraper
Yeah. Not that this is bad, but there are lots of more up-to-date articles on
Fushcia.

E.g. from May [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-
smar...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smartphone-
os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/)

~~~
bertazure
Yeah! By the way, there is this mention of 3D world in Armadillo User Shell:
[https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/3d+world](https://fuchsia-
review.googlesource.com/#/q/3d+world)

Can you please try to elaborate on this?

------
px1999
It sounds to me like an operation intended to employ some skilled engineers in
order to keep them away from working on Google's competitors. I don't see a
lot of outreach or organisational support, but maybe it is there and my
cursory glance just hasn't turned any up.

It looks like they're doing the Google equivalent of Microsoft Research -
which as far as I can tell revolves around hoping something cool comes of the
projects, but mostly just trying to keep their competitors from getting top
talent.

~~~
ghostly_s
That would be truly nefarious (which fits in perfectly with Google's M.O.). Do
you know of any precedent for companies operating in this way? I guess the NSA
probably operates on similar principles?

~~~
durgiston
Why is this nefarious? Nothing is forcing these allegedly top employees from
staying at Google. They get to work on something cool and get paid presumably
a disgusting amount of money, and Google gets to maybe have a groundbreaking
technology at the end of it, and their competitors don't get the allegedly top
guys. If those employees would feel more fulfilled working somewhere else, and
many do end up leaving, they can.

~~~
ghostly_s
What the OP described is removing talented people from the labor pool and
directing them towards efforts which have no expected application in the
market. I'm not suggesting it's the individuals who choose this arrangement
who are losing out, it's society at large.

------
Raynak
I'd do it to get rid of the fucking dependence on Java.

~~~
davemp
Be careful what you wish for, the OS might end up with javascript.

~~~
d215
Well, actually the fuchsia folks seem to take rust seriously...

[https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta-
rs/](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta-rs/)
[https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/mxruntime/](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/mxruntime/)

------
javajosh
Anyone know why they are building in C as opposed to a newer language like
Rust or Go? I mean, if you're going to start from scratch, might as well go
all the way, right?

~~~
bitcoinmoney
C is still the king in performance I believe. Linux still has assembly code
apart from C for those crucial performant sections.

Remember if you are talking at the HW-level you don't have the luxury of
libraries and I doubt Go/Rust would be of any help unless you build the
ecosystem for it. Something like the implementation of coreutil binaries can
benefit from Go/Rust but not the OS-code itself.

~~~
steveklabnik
If Rust is significantly slower than C, it's a bug.

~~~
fooker
Yeah, just one that will take a decade of compiler optimizations to solve. C
and C++ didn't become what they are today overnight.

~~~
steveklabnik
We share an optimizer with clang thanks to LLVM; we get to take advantages of
those decades already.

~~~
fooker
Clang and LLVM have evolved together for a while. It is pretty difficult to
get similar results with other LLVM frontends.

You don't have to believe me, just write a reasonably complicated algorithm
(say.. a naive SAT solver) with both C++ and Rust (or Swift or $NEW_LANG) and
compare the speeds.

~~~
steveklabnik
You don't have to believe me either; if you try it, you should generally see
that they have the same performance.

~~~
fooker
Here are some fairly realistic examples.

1\. Rust :
[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=rust&lang2=gcc)

2\. Swift :
[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=swift&lang2=gcc)

As for a SAT solver, I was not speaking out of my ass. Here is one try that
got a fair bit of attention. [https://github.com/mishun/minisat-
rust](https://github.com/mishun/minisat-rust)

~~~
steveklabnik
Yeah, we've had some small regressions recently; a few months ago we were
usually faster, now we're slightly slower. Still generally close, except for
the ones that need explicit SIMD, as that's still being designed.

------
PhantomGremlin
Antagonistic headline.

The article does a pretty good job of answering the question: Linux is
bloated, isn't real time, and has IP issues.

~~~
igravious
Linux is modular, you can remove the parts you don't want.

Linux has multiple real-time varietals.

Linux has no IP issues that I know of.

~~~
ahartmetz
IP issue: Google doesn't have the right to give hardware vendors a pass on
proprietary drivers for Linux. Ignoring the problem seems to work so far,
though.

That said, a stable driver API with the possibility to update the kernel
without updating drivers is probably more important to Google. In the best
case (and I expect a worse result than that) it means that Android phones can
be updated for a long time without requiring support from the vendor.

The damn vendors should just upstream the damn drivers. Drivers for embedded
hardware are such a clusterfuck. You have no idea how bad it is unless you
have worked in that space.

~~~
greglindahl
Linux "enterprise" distributions update things for a long time without
requiring support from the hardware vendor.

Google's familiar with this approach, I hear that they backported x86-64 to an
earlier kernel for years.

~~~
ahartmetz
In the embedded case, usually only vendors have (or used to have, who knows if
they use source control) the source code. As I said, you have no idea how bad
it is unless you've had to work with that crap. Maybe have a look at "Bad" in
this classic. [https://www.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-
emulator...](https://www.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-
opengl-drivers-hall-fameshame/?cr=de)

Edit: right, you can backport fixes and features while keeping the ABI stable.
That is what Google seems to be doing with Android kernels to some degree.

------
chauhankiran
And it start with a simple program like this:
[https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/init/+/d609758af8bb0b7c66d2...](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/init/+/d609758af8bb0b7c66d21a458043ee7bb3487bfb/init.c)

------
swiley
Yeah all the other user facing system software Google has written ended up so
well...

Chrome

Chrome OS

Android

~~~
tradersam
Chrome is by far the most popular browser by market share[1][2], and Android
is the most prevalent OS in the entire world[3][4], so... not really sure what
you're getting at here.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables)

[2]: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/268299/most-popular-
inte...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268299/most-popular-internet-
browsers/)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Mobile_devices)

[4]: [http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/most-popular-operating-
syst...](http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/most-popular-operating-system.html)

------
largote
IMPACT

~~~
matthberg
Um?

