Slashdot Mirror
Stallman's Legacy Halts At Hardware (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: To say Richard Stallman had a profound effect on free software is not a bold enough statement. The power of the GPL, and his advocacy for software freedom have changed the world. But there is one frontier that has yet to hear this gospel. These days, no hardware is an island. Almost every type of electronics we use is running some type of code, and in almost every case some of that code is secret in more ways than one. From beefy processors to graphics controllers, boot ROMs and binary blobs run in the silicon we base our systems upon. The code is not published and in the rare case that you are able to view the source it is only under strict NDA. This represents one of the biggest barriers to true open hardware.
Stallman has always had the right idea IMHO, but that 'ideal' put up against Corp Profit will never win sadly.
"Those who don't understand code, will be owned by those who do"
I'm all for a hardware manufacturer who creates and promotes 100% open hardware with public code provided.....................know any?
The biggest barrier to true open hardware is the fact someone has to pay for a tangible good, and that tangible good - hardware - is designed for a specific purpose. The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon as you desire. The block is silicon that does what you want to do in the first place. And that carries with it costs beyond just software creation.
i'm designing Libre Hardware, right now. i've been on this task for the past five years, since the embarrassing time when i encouraged 20 software libre developers to join me in buying one of the very first ARM netbooks to come out (back in 2010) that turned out to be GPL-violating. i had to spend a frantic 3 weeks reverse-engineering the hardware in order to provide those people with a GPL-compliant linux kernel.
this example just on its own demonstrates that what you have said is simply untrue in a very profound and subtle way. you claim "The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon" - how can you load a kernel into memory using the BIOS's bootloader (if there is one) if you do not know how the BIOS *actually works*? how can you load a kernel into memory if you don't have the hardware's documentation? what if the proprietary bootloader (if there is one) has some sort of checksum or DRM where you are not provided the keys?
another example is the IBM / Lenovo laptops, where the BIOS had the PCIe device and MAC address of the WIFI adapter *burned into EEPROM*. quite literally the only way for people to replace the WIFI adapter was to *replace the entire BIOS*. that required a *massive* reverse-engineering effort and we now have coreboot support for many Lenovo laptops.
time and time again i have had to cut certain SoCs and ICs from the list of products because i cannot get the SDK, cannot get the Datasheet, cannot get *any* information about how the SoC or IC works.
so you claim "the block is silicon that does what you want to do" - it only does what you want to do via a hardware API which requires an extremely comprehensive bit-level and timing-critical software-driven understanding of that "block". without that, the hardware is LITERALLY useless. [remember NDISWRAPPER for WIFI cards?]
can you see, therefore, through these examples, that you've fundamentally misunderstood the complexity of the issue, and why there are such severe barriers to entry in the hardware arena?
i *do* understand this, so it's why i have been working for the past five years on creating Libre-compliant eco-conscious hardware, where the hardware - all of it - will be vetted for GPL-compliance before putting it into production. sounds mad? but it's the only way, i feel, that instead of waiting for someone else to tackle this, i'm *actively* taking responsibility for ensuring that there exists Libre-compliant Hardware.
APL is very different from GPL. The most successful GPL-program is gcc — which is waning now that there is clang, to which the evil KKKorporations can contribute without fear. You seem to conflate all open-source licenses together — and that's a mistake.
The MIT-licensed X11 is very "end user", Mozilla-licensed Libreoffice — even more so (do I need to mention firefox?) No, it is perfectly possible to have a popular open-sourced software offering. But adoption of GPL is a kiss of death.
What Stallman must've hoped for 30 years ago was the thinking like: "Ok, they use GPL, so we'll do so too to be able to use their code." What happened instead is: "Oh, they use GPL, so we'll have to implement the same functionality ourselves."
GPL is a failure, open source is not.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How was it a "right" idea? The society - and generations of programmers - were spending considerable efforts on software, which could not be used by all. This caused a substantial duplication of efforts...
It was the right idea at the time. What you describe is precisely what was happening in the 1980s. GPL was a drastic medicine for this; since the source could not be re-closed, its sole target was to avoid just that duplication. For achieving this, I applaud GNU, no question.
Fast forward 20 years. People have become accustomed that software is free. From OS to $EDITOR, compiler & desktop. And now the liberty of GPL starts to become a hindrance at times. People want to use GPL stuff for work, and can't because $REASON. BSD/MIT software gets more popular again.
My argument here is that the BSD/MIT software would not be so popular now, if it wasn't for GPL. E.g. LLVM would never have gotten its Apple blessing as an opensource compiler if it wasn't for GCC. Heck, it isn't even now. Just compare the quality difference between opensource and Apple clang.
GPL did its duty in the 1980's, 1990's and 2000's. We can afford the luxury of dispensing with it for now, because it was successful, not because it is bad. Sure BSD/MIT software can achieve more than GPL because it can get industry money to support it easier then GPL software. But only because there always is an implied threat that such BSD/MIT projects can re-license to GPL. It keeps the industry at bay.
Stallman doubled down with GPL3,
Not going to start an argument here. Just noting that GPL3 is the logical fallout from what I describe above.
No, RMS is straight fucking ignorant about hardware, and that whole e-mail exchange proves it.
How about you get Stallman's unwashed cock out of your mouth for a minute so you can possibly have a chance to smell his bullshit?