D-bus had been around for a decade. Asserting that X was inappropriate requires a little more justification in my view than a blanket testimony. Worked ok for Nokia!
Binder was proprietary closed technology that came from a pre-Linux use, if I i recall correctly? It was spun off from OpenBinder from Be Inc and Palm. Android built their own initially closed new Binder, for Android Inc, before the acquisition by Google. You're right that it existed first, in some form. I do keep forgetting that DBus itself isn't that old, 2002, so yes, Binder has earlier roots. But it was never really a thing anywhere in the Linux world? No one knew about it or used it? It was a novel new direction for Linux, with no real precedent. And sure, I am sympathetic to not just hopping on the latest messaging bus, assuming it's going to work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBinder
Perhaps Binder is lower memory footprint, but given the size of messages sent around (small, sometimes with sizable attachment files), I expect this is a rounding error at best. I'm pretty skeptical this was a grounded decision based on memory footprint.
The timeline where Android decided to care about the valent Linux ecosystem doesn't seem quite as hard to imagine as you make it out to be. It would have meant giving up on previous really good ideas from Be, from Palm, that they adopted & re-cut for their own purposes. It would have meant looking at the open source ecosystem, tracking it, & caring.
SurfaceFlinger was also NIH, contrary to your previous statement. Sure Wayland didn't exist. But once again I think there's no real actual factual strong basis to say X wasn't enough. If you want to pose some hypotheticals for arguments you'd make that indicate that direction, you're welcome to make the claims. But it sure was NIH, as other did use X and Android invented it, so I think you're just arguing whether it was justified NIH or not.
Last, I don't see how some cheap shots at Nokia hardware (running on an already quite middle-of-the-road at-best core) reflects on this whole point. This feels like yet more just trying to shut down engagement/discussion/conversation, close down thinking. So what if Nokia wasn't making the greatest hardware? So what if they used a very middling TI cpu that wasn't very good? Those to me are questions of circumstance, are much less interesting than what the OSes reached for.
I realize comments on HN tend to be very terse and short, but you've made so many big claims, with so little substantiation or support, and they seem on the face of them pretty misleading or outright wrong. And none of them point to any evidence or circumstance, or are guarded: they don't argue, they insist. I personally prefer more open debate, and would like to see a little richer respect for nuance, a little less heavy handed absolutes.
