The OEMs are incapable of writing a competent operating system, and don't particularly care to.
> Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
With what maintainers?
https://chrome-commit-tracker.arthursonzogni.com/organizatio...
It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.
Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres from Oracle because it doesn’t make financial sense anymore.
now, if we could only stop eating at the trough of Broadcom…
Postgres ftw. Long may it eat their lunch.
Oracle used to be a must-have because it was one of the few products that could handle transactions on a scale of a bank, with all the requirements for backups, redundancy, etc.
A fun anecdote. Back in 2000, I was present at negotiations (as a note-taker) where database vendors were bidding for a project for a factory control system. Vendors submitted benchmark results for various DB sizes up to 40Gb, and Oracle's rep hautingly said something like: "Our minimal size for benchmarks is 80Gb, so here are our results for that size".
And this was a _lot_ for that time. Now? It's so ridiculously tiny that you can host it on a smartwatch. So why would you pay Oracle?
They have their private own agreements with Google to secure whatever access they need to maintain their OneUI fork and are not the one making any public complaints. Samsung did have a love/hate relationship with Google that was openly simmering with resentment during the early years of Android but those days are long past.
Samsung already includes their own Galaxy store alongside the Play Store on all their devices, and have for 10+ years. But during that time have actually moved the opposite direction from your hypothetical fork scenario and both companies clearly view their current relationship as mutually beneficial.
Even though GrapheneOS and Samsung both maintain their own Android fork their views on AOSP/Google are not aligned.
Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.
Who will step up to maintain it? Keep in mind that it has to be somebody that every other OEM trust. In other words it would likely have to be an alliance of manufacturers. And they'd inevitably treat OEMs outside the alliance poorly and we'd be back to the current situation, but worse.