I read the article, and I do hope that Fuchsia is successful. A fast and secure microkernel that is open source would truly be godsend for many security needs, and a threat to each and all monolithic kernels.
The article is rather light on detail, dwells on a "starnix shell" (which sounds like dom0 not mksh), goes on about a clock widget, but adds this:
"It’s now been over a year since the Starnix proposal was accepted and work began. In that time, the Fuchsia team has made significant progress in making Linux programs capable of running on Fuchsia devices."
When I build a chroot() for a legacy application, I am expecting to dramatically raise the difficulty of exploitation.
I shouldn't have that expectation of Fuchsia just yet, even though it has been released into commercial products.
We are all really hoping for a kernel that "just works, and never needs patching" in the manner of chacha.
It isn't finished yet, and some of the security parts in the documentation have TODOs in the code.
You know, as a project which is well well well before release usually is.
As for "Why didn't Google just buy QNX/Blackberry?" they basically grabbed the BEOS kernel developer, and are using Zircon as their kernel.