[jerf]

The kernel isn't dying, it's niche. It always has been and it always will be.

Fortunately for the kernel, despite being niche, it has a rock-solid onramp forcing people to get into it. There will always be companies interested in the n'th degree of performance, both generally, and for some specific hardware. Someone has to go do the relevant kernel work for those things. So while you or I may never touch it, it is effectively impossible for a kernel like Linux to just rot away because nobody cares. It would require first a multi-year, if not multi-decade process of fading first.

[biorach]

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)

[jerf]

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

[teddyh]

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

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

[samhw]

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

[teddyh]

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.

[samhw]

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

[mustache_kimono]

> 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?

[throwaway82652]

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.

[teddyh]

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.

[camgunz]

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

[pjmlp]

Android Linux !== Linux.