[what-imright]

Why is the title “Is there hope for linux on smartphones?”?

If it said “Is there hope for GNU on smartphones?” the answer would be a resounding no, because the community is fractured and politicized to the degree the products are uncompetitive. Pinephone is an example. Then there was the Ubuntu effort.

Android, being partly closed as the GPL2 allows for, is proof that Linux can be highly successful without the GNU crowd. And perhaps they should stop taking credit for software they didn’t write. They made the license.

For all the complaining, the free software community hasn’t designed from the ground up and released one single production class handset alternative at a time when the culture consumes in the billions. That’s says a lot. The infighting and utopian idealistic virtue signaling is in sharp contrast to the reality of the platforms the GNU crowd has built.

[tingletech]

most of the user space tools originated from GNU (such as gcc), linux really just brought the kernel.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Alpine Linux and clang say otherwise. GNU is good, but it's not the only Linux userspace.

[tingletech]

sure, but it was the original one. upstream posts contends GNU just brought the license.

[what-imright]

Just? It’s 28 million lines of code, the world’s largest software project

[umanwizard]

What counts as one software project? The combined Facebook codebase, for example, is surely larger than that.

[anthk]

Chromium is bigger than that.