Re: Long term plan for GuixSD security: microkernels, ocap, RISC-V support

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira <adfeno@hyperbola.info>]

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Em 24/09/2018 11:14, Ludovic Courtès escreveu:
> Christopher Lemmer Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> skribis:
>>    - There's also Google's recent work with Magenta/Fuschia.  From what
>>      I've read, architecturally this looks right.  I think the reason
>>      for worry here is the same difficulty the community has had to
>>      build actual community and libre distributions on top of the
>>      Android ecosystem could apply here.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> We could also mention MINIX, which many of us are already using daily.
> :-)
> 
> Putting aside Fuschia, I think the Hurd and MINIX are by far the
> solutions that require the less work to be in a state where people with
> “regular needs” like the rest of us to switch (MINIX is probably in that
> state already.)
> 
> The Hurd already has a very advanced POSIX C library, which is not
> negligible, especially compared to the other OSes.  Much progress has
> been made in recent years wrt. drivers (using the Rump kernel in
> particular.)  There are of course serious shortcomings, in particular
> lack of 64-bit and SMP support.  But fixing these is relatively “little
> work” in the grand scheme of things.
> 
> To put this in perspective, consider Linux namespaces: they have already
> seen years of evolution, and the story of user namespaces shows that
> it’s far from complete.

I don't know if what I'll say will be off-topic here given that this
list is about Guix development, not on general free/libre software
activism, but please forgive me anyways.

So, my worry is that if we somehow were to support Fuchsia and if it
were to be not strong auto-upgradable copyleft with community-oriented
enforcement, then we could actually loose the freedoms of the software
for the end user. This thought was initially presented by Eben Moglen
during one of his talks[1], but I just tried to bring the issue to Guix.

[1]
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-free-software-movement-in-the-age-of-trump/


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