Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

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Because not everything is about FSF-purity standards. Running a profitable company while providing as many open packages as possible is commendable. Pushing to open more is. But jeez, would it hurt to show some love to people who genuinely do care at least a bit about open firmware?

And yes, a lot of us do love OSS but also have clients who require windows compatibility. Some of us do deep learning and need good GPU/Cuda support. We all do compromises with OSS ideals, and it is GREAT to have people like System76 fill in that niche.

Otherwise the choice would be only between pure-FSF machine that run only some specific distribs of linux (I do own a novena, you know) or totally proprietary system that come only with windows and 50 GB of crapware. Without Systm 76, I would just be buying another DELL so thanks and kudos to them.

Thanks and kudos to the people who also uncompromisingly prepare an open and resilient ecosystem of open chips, open GPUs, open firmware.

But please do show some love to each other and dont get stuck in an absolutist position where you can't see the difference between people trying to find a market to OSS pieces and promoters of walled gardens.

I still don't understand why you would even care about the firmware if you're running Windows. To me, that would be like building a fortified, ultra-secure rear doorway into a run down barn with a gaping hole where the front doors used to be.

If these efforts were even potentially likely to result in open x86 systems someday, I wouldn't be as opposed to them as I am now. But when you have both x86 silicon vendors on record as being contractually and legally unable, let alone unwilling, to allow owner control, all I see is a massive waste of effort with a known incomplete (i.e. partly closed) endgame. Worse, that effort is detracting from other efforts that are providing fully open computing right now, today.

My recommendation has always been to use the commodity x86 world's greatest advantage if you have to use Windows: cost. Get the absolute cheapest possible Windows system you can find that still has enough power to support your clients, plan on replacing it every so often as Windows churns along, and actually invest in a secure, open computer for everything else.

x86 is a closed ISA with closed, locked, signed firmware. All appearances are that it will stay that way permanently, with just enough late-stage open firmware allowed to create sufficient marketing confusion in less technical circles. Why not select and embrace one of the open ISAs for non-Windows computing? Who knows, you might be helping make secure / non-hostile computing happen on a large scale just a little bit faster! :)

For the same reason I cared to run linux even before we had open BIOS. Would you have been shouting at young Torvalds that he was wasting his time trying to write a free OS in a world of proprietary hardware?

We won't get to a fully open ecosystem in a day. It wont be a single project, and the more experimental parts you add to the platform, the higher the cost you pay in instability, complexity of maintenance, and performances.

I am not always running windows. But I have it installed for when I have to test aginst it.

I am not a dissident, a journalist or a spy, so my threat model is not the NSA or PCC prying on my contact list.

My threat model is the scenario "Microsoft and a random hardware vendor team up to make sure <Technology X> can never work on linux" which history has shown to be a credible one.

Actors like System 76 fight against it and I am grateful.

Getting CPUs, motherboards, GPU and drive drivers provably clean and incapable of spying is a magnitude harder, starts being feasible, but so far I am not in a category where I absolutely need that. I am pretty happy that some people start offering that too but it helps no one to pretend that people working on these parallel lines are somehow opposed. That's a self-defeating attitude!

>Would you have been shouting at young Torvalds that he was wasting his time trying to write a free OS in a world of proprietary hardware?

Yeah. It wouldn't have stopped him, probably just made him want an open platform even more.

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