Comment by kuschku
3 hours ago
Google also made that argument, and further argued that they could do it better.
Which is why they planned to replace the entire kernel and services with zircon and fuchsia, and a new Android runtime ontop.
Guess what, turns out Google actually does need the community contributions of the Linux and Java projects.
What community contributions? Linux is mostly corporately developed with Google being one of the major contributors.
Google also fully maintains the ART VM running on Android - despite Oracle, the owner and developer of Java - famously wanting a piece of it.
What community contributions are you talking about there? Where does this myth come from?
> What community contributions? Linux is mostly corporately developed with Google being one of the major contributors.
Linux has a lot of corporate contributors, but it's been a long standing problem that many of these only add new features that their new pet project needs. Long-term maintenace and improvements is often done by volunteers, and many important subsystems rely entirely on volunteer work.
This was also famously an issue with e.g. AMD's GPU driver, which was appreciated as it allowed a mainstream GPU to be fully supported with an in-kernel driver, but the disadvantage that now volunteers had to maintain hundredthousands of LOC of code, most of which was autogenerated hardware interfaces with little documentation, which made refactoring and cleanup work almost impossible.
> Google also fully maintains the ART VM running on Android - despite Oracle, the owner and developer of Java - famously wanting a piece of it.
Had you followed the release notes, you'd have noticed that that hasn't been the case since Android 8 Oreo, when the entire Java standard library on Android was switched from Apache Harmony to OpenJDK. That's why Android was finally able to move beyond Java 7 and introduce modern functionality, fix the broken NIO implementation, and add JSR-310 Date and Time fuctions, just to mention a few of the improvements since then.
These have been developed by the Java community, including corporations and individual contributors.