It’s really, really hard for me to see any Google efforts as anything other than mechanisms to convert more people into products and harvest their data. They do support good stuff - I’m heavily invested in Go, and except for the fact thay it’s mainly used to drive web applications and, therefore, the Google ecosystem, I haven’t found any way thay my use of it can directly harvest me. But in general, Google has earned a position of “guilty, until proven innocent,” and I’m skeptical of any OS they promote.
It feels like they’re jumping on the Rust bandwagon in hopes that fans will blindly use their OS because “Rust,” only to find out a core component phones all activity to Google for “quality control.”
I may be wrong, it may be innocent. I have not yet been wrong when I’ve been suspicious* of Google.
- I picked up Go back before I realized just how far from “do no evil” Google had shifted.
Dart, another language from google, has the toolchain constantly phoning home and locking you into google services, so that might be in Go’s toolchain as well. though Go is lower level than Dart so it probably doesn’t need large enough of a toolchain where it’s possible to do that
They basically got sel4 and said what if rust? Well that is an obvious take. I’m glad to see sel4 gaining some traction though. Formally correct OSs is the future.
True, but here it’s the thing which is somehow concerning… GNU has attempted to bring sel4, and other interesting ukernels to hurd, with so few hands, and no one really getting interested. And now that Google tries it, oh, how innovative…
I like the move to ukernels, and focus on clean by design. However as mentioned by others, it’s still Google… We’ll see. It’ll be interesting to see where this new effort leads. Will this take over Google’s mobile OS eventually, or chromeOS, or would there be a PC kind on Google OS?
A open-source privacy focused OS from google?
Cant wait for the proprietary modules!
