Google seems to be putting a lot of resources into their new Fuchsia OS, which though open source, is still completely managed by Google. It also has the drawback of not being under copyleft licenses like GPL, which means other companies can just take it and make proprietary forks.
People who have followed the Fuchsia project, do you see it eventually becoming a significant enough competitor to Linux to be a threat to it, and therefore giving Google even more control of the software world?
Sorry for necrobumping this, but perhaps after two years we can in fact see where this is going. While 9to5Google claims Google is going full speed ahead with the os, Ars Technica reports that Fuchsia was hit among the hardest during all the tech lay-offs at the start of this year, losing 16% of its workforce, while Google averaged 6%. Perhaps that means there’s hope.
It seems unlikely that any os, even by Google, would be able to pose a serious threat to Linux’ current over 99% server dominance. However, it could be a threat to the FOSS community were it to replace the Android kernel. Google has been moving functionality from Android to Google Play for quite some time already. If they continue this, Android will eventually end up being only a Linux kernel, which can than be replaced by the Fuchsia kernel with a mandatory update to all phones with Google Play. No end-user would be impacted by this, since all the apps would simply move over too.
This would however be problematic for /e/, GrapheneOS, CalyxOS and the like. They would be left behind with AOSP, and no apps except the ones found in F-Droid. That means no banking apps, no mandatory government apps (think Corona) and nothing else that is only provided by official institutes and corporations. In fact, they would be worse off than people using Ubuntu Touch/PostmarketOS et al. now, because using Waydroid they can still use many apps from the Play Store.