ARM is all about licensing and selling hardware IP, they will use Linux to the extent that it helps to sell their IP, just like most companies that actually pay for engineers to contribute some parts of their crown jewels to Linux, while leaving the rest for their own in-house distributions.

Also in case you haven't noticed, the IoT domain where ARM thrives is getting full of BSD/MIT POSIX clones, guess why.

ARM mbed, Zephyr, RTOS, NuttX, Azure RTOS ThreadX, ...

Having an liberally licensed code-base with make it very easy for entities to publish a benign version on github, and then deploy an "enhanced" version on the real hardware, cryptographiclly signed, and not dumpable. They'll find something, that can support the argument, that not all functionality can be open-sourced, and that is why the published binary will never have the same checksum as something you have compiled from the public sources.

From my comment history you will see I am pretty much into commercial and dual licensing, so I do agree with your point, however kind of feels like the way copyleft licenses have been managed has brought us back to the commercial licenses with source code, just under a different name to make them more appealing to younger generations.

Hi, thanks for replying!

> the way copyleft licenses have been managed has brought us back to the commercial licenses with source code, just under a different name to make them more appealing to younger generations.

I think, I'm following along (&agree), but to be sure, could you perhaps elaborate a bit on that? (Also for other? readers)

Basically Linux kernel, GNU utilities and GCC are the only projects left with a copyleft license, almost everyone else migrated to non-copyleft licenses in the context of making money with some form of open source.

And not everything gets upstream, in name of keeping the main business at the company's soul, for example those optimizations used by clang on PS4? Sure all of those that don't reveal PS4 architecture features that could eventually be "misused".

The large majority of those business have moved into clang, thus reducing GCC usage to copyleft hardliners, Linux is visible on ChromeOS and Android but not on a context that it can fully profit from and then there is Fuchsia waiting on the backstage.

So in a couple of generations, when copyleft software is just a memory in digital books, we will have gone full circle to the days when buying developer software would entitle you to an extra floppy with a partial copy the source code.

The only difference is how that partial copy gets delivered, which will be just the upstream of non-copyleft software.

O.K. so we see the same things.

I can't discern from your writing tone, if you think the above is desirable or a train_wreck_in_slow_motion coming.

I think, it's the latter, not necessarily by direct effect, but by all the bad behavior this will enable in corporations for generations to come.

ARM has little use except for open source. They have zero incentive to kill it, as they don't compete with it.

> ARM has little use except for open source.

Huh?? ARM is probably the most popular CPU architecture in use today -- unlike x86, which is largely limited to desktop/laptop and server computing, ARM is used in a lot of embedded applications.

Have you the counts of systems using ARM on Linux(Android) vs ARM in everything else? It's not even close.

You're underestimating the number of ARM microcontrollers in deeply embedded devices. For example, most hard disks and SSDs have at least one ARM core -- and often several -- running the device. They're also quite common in peripherals, like keyboards and mice. The firmware for these devices is often either a realtime embedded OS (like FreeRTOS), or is entirely bespoke. It's virtually never open-source.

Even if you're only looking at mobile phones, the cellular baseband is often implemented on ARM as well, and it definitely isn't a Linux system either. (Nor is it open source.)

Indeed. https://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/record-numbers-arm-b...: “Arm silicon partners shipped a record 6.4 billion Arm-based chips in the fourth quarter of 2019”

Compare that with https://www.slashgear.com/the-2019-global-smartphone-sales-t..., which says about 1,5 billion smartphones were sold in the four quarters of 2019.

Also, Android, I think, by now is an edge case of open source. The kernel is, but there’s a thick proprietary layer on top of it without which it wouldn’t be Android.

I'll just reply once here. Thanks for the source. Keep in mind each cell phone can/does have multiple ARM chips, which I attribute still to 'Linux', maybe that's not fair.

I tried to get real stats and didn't get far. The most I could find was that ARM was actually declining somewhat in embedded, and that embedded was less than half of revenues. Also, that ARM had 90 percent of the 'phone/tablet/laptop' market, but nothing amounting to close to a majority anywhere else.

I think I was incorrect saying that it isn't close, it likely is. I still think more go to supporting a Linux device than not, but am happy to be proven wrong if such data exists.

I don’t have those numbers, but would guess that, the smaller the ARM CPU, the more of them are sold.

Also, the more are sold, the more hardware costs become important relatively to development costs, making Linux a poorer choice than smaller OSes or even bare metal.

(And the smallest really are small. https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors/cortex-m/co... tells me you can get a 0.0066 mm² 32-bit CPU. That one doesn’t have a MMU)

Last I heard was hard disks and SSD manufacturers were moving away from ARM to RISC-V to save money on ARM license payments.

Source

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=swerv

Heck, every AMD processor has an ARM core on it to run some firmware. So even if you're running x86, you may also be running ARM.

You seem ignorant of exactly how many embedded systems out there are not running linux but smaller OS or just bare metal custom kernels. You should research it. Looks like someone down below is less lazy than me and gave some source so do some reading. ARM cores are everywhere buried deep, where you can't see, waiting for skynet to come along

did you really spam the whole song here ?

It would have been funny if you replied "that just a tribute" (semi-quoting a Tenacious D song)