alt Hacker NewsI want GOS to succeed; I'm afraid their exceptional technical and developmental skills could be made mostly ineffective by their foot-gun conduct. Fanboys urging them on or defending everything they do are driving them toward a cliff.
GOS can just talk about the upside, their solution to this problem. That's great work. But they often choose to denigrate others, which is destructive, damages relationships (the most essential assets - especially when you have no money to offer!), and is myopic: GOS's sh-t stinks too; they f- things up too. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who tresspass against us.
It seems especially dangerous being entirely dependant on Google's goodwill; Google has zero need for GOS. I'd think Motorola, who now has money and reputation depending on GOS's success, would tell GOS to zip it. If I were in that industry and looking to partner, I might love GOS's technology but their behavior would be hard to overcome. For example, I love OpenBSD, but who partners with them? And OpenBSD isn't dependant on someone else.
Just zip it, be professional, focus on what you are doing and not on others. Great job on this fix!
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> But they often choose to denigrate others, which is destructive, damages relationships
It used to be like that (and to be fair, all the similar communities were contributing to the drama, not just GOS), I agree, but I genuinely feel like it has become a lot more professional lately. Like I haven't seen drama in... at least 6 months?
Now I almost exclusively see them explain their technical decisions, which is very interesting.
There are plenty of messages on this site where the GOS lead assumed the best while Google tightened the rope.. Google was never the right choice for a partner when being able to choose only one hardware vendor. Google made changes to AOSP that are basically infringement of GPL using the usual embargo security theater. GOS making some noise is good for their business since if they don't, even their existing user base will assume they will be squashed like a bug.
wow, well said. This explains why I always felt a bit off about GOS. I'm reminded of Igalia, who does a ton of work on Safari but always comes across as professional and dependent.
There's a certain humility in how Igalia conducts business, and they contribute sooo much to the web ecosystem.
> GOS can just talk about the upside, their solution to this problem. That's great work. But they often choose to denigrate others, which is destructive, damages relationships…
Sorry, but no. This sentiment isn’t too different from politics in the US right now where the politicians that “call it like it is” are significantly more popular than the “traditional take the high road speech” candidates. It’s a lame thought process.
I appreciate GrapheneOS telling it like it is, and their language highlights the failings of Google. It’s unacceptable that the maintainer of Android/AOSP is performing like this.
> I'd think Motorola, who now has money and reputation depending on GOS's success, would tell GOS to zip it. If I were in that industry and looking to partner, I might love GOS's technology but their behavior would be hard to overcome.
This has little to no effect on Motorola. They didn’t even promote their partnership with GOS and mostly only GOS users and tech enthusiasts are even aware of this partnership. People who need / want GOS don’t care about the attitude of the developers as long as they deliver beneficial things and don’t go off the fascist/racist/socially unacceptable deep end (and even that is debatable just look at Omarchy and it’s sponsors as well as Brave). The average consumer could not care less and will continue to be unaware of GOS at best, and at worst view it as negatively as the press tries to portray it when the government tries to attack someone’s digital civil liberties.
>Just zip it, be professional, focus on what you are doing and not on others.
How do you propose they "focus on what [they're] doing and not on others" when their entire project is dependent on other's (Google's) work that directly impacts their own users? There's nothing about this blog post that is unprofessional. GrapheneOS released a patch for a rather severe performance bug, which is outside the scope of their normal work, so they provided context into why they made the decision to do so.