Bloomberg on Project ‘Fuchsia’, Google’s Possible Successor to Android

Mark Bergen and Mark Gurman co-bylined a story on Fuchsia for Bloomberg. There’s not really much meat to it, and there’s a strange technical error which claims Linux “is distributed by Oracle Corp.” and “is at the center of a lengthy, bitter lawsuit between the two companies”. Oracle has no ownership over Linux whatsoever. The lawsuit is entirely about Google’s use of Java in Android — Oracle did take ownership of Java when they bought the remains of Sun.

Anyway, this was the most interesting tidbit to me:

The company must also settle some internal feuds. Some of the principles that Fuchsia creators are pursuing have already run up against Google’s business model. Google’s ads business relies on an ability to target users based on their location and activity, and Fuchsia’s nascent privacy features would, if implemented, hamstring this important business. There’s already been at least one clash between advertising and engineering over security and privacy features of the fledgling operating system, according to a person familiar with the matter. The ad team prevailed, this person said.

Not a problem engineers working on OSes at Apple or Microsoft have to worry about.

★ Thursday, 19 July 2018