RISC-V Community: "ARM Architecture: Understand the Facts"

arm-basics.com

41 points·kasbah··3 comments

There's a big misunderstanding that open source, in and of itself, is more secure. Time and again this has been proven wrong (remember heartbleed?)

Where open source does benefit is a more timely and fair fix to a reported security bug. A company's closed source implementation may not be in as much of a hurry to fix security bugs if there isn't an immediate effect on the bottom line

Also, how's open source supposed to minimize fragmentation? Desktop Linux has a hundred flavors and even with a standardized ABI, there's no guarantees on a single binary working seamlessly across distros ( which is the reason for this like flatpack to exist)

Open source can introduce a kind of de-factor standardization when some project becomes the go-to solution for some domain, with almost everyone using it and contributing improvements. It is a type of network effect, the feedback loop being made possible by the open source development model. Examples include the Linux kernel, the GCC compiler[1] and even OpenSSL (which is what made heartbleed such a big deal).

Of course there still exists a long tail of alternatives, there is no stopping that in an open source world.

1. Arguably shifting to LLVM/clang these days. But note that clang for instance implements a huge amount of GCC compatible behavior (like commandline flags), instead of inventing their own.

How on earth is adding new features to the architecture in updates seen as fragmentation? Is everyone supposed to stick with v8.0? Moron.

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