Hacker News Reader

Comment by naringas | Hacker News Reader

but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact.

however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs.

in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint.

also, it seems to me that in some sense the entire market works in cooperation, just not very efficiently (it optimizes for other things than efficiency and is heavily distorted by subsidies and tariffs)

View on HN

> but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact.

Sort of?

I tried to get into FPGA programming a while ago, and it turns out the entire software stack to get from an idea in my brain to a blinking LED on a dev board is hot garbage. First of all, it's insanely expensive, and second of all, it really, really sucks. Like how is it <current year> (I forgot what year it was, but it was 2016-2018 timeframe) and you've tried to reinvent the IDE and failed?

I think projects like RISC-V and J Core are super cool, but I couldn't possibly even attempt to contribute to them based on how awful the process is.

Same. Started off in love w FPGA design in college. Software design is light-years ahead of that area in terms of tool maturity, functionality and freedom.

Check out IceStorm (+Yosys, nextpnr...) for a pretty complete open source toolchain for ice40 FPGAs. It's really amazing to go from the infuriating to use vendor tools with all their quirks and bugs to a single 'make' that just generates the bitfile without using the broken IDE or complaining about licenses...

The FPGAs are also relatively inexpensive (<5-10€ in single quantities depending on the model) but are on the lower end in terms of features and performance.

The tools should also support the more powerful ECP5 FPGAs, but I haven't tried them yet.

Interesting, thank you for the pointer. I've been playing around with FPGAs a bit and this sounds like it might just be what I was looking for. Is there any starter board that you'd recommend for this workflow?

I've only used the bare chips on custom boards, so I have no experience with the eval boards.

A popular board a few years ago was the iCEstick for about 20€, but I can't find it anywhere for that price now. The ICE40 breakout boards from Lattice are also more expensive now for whatever reason. Olimex has a board with the HX8K that is more reasonably priced, but unfortunately doesn't have an onboard programmer...

For the ECP5, the ULX3S board looks interesting. It's not exactly cheap, but also has more features than just buttons, LEDs, and pin headers like on the other boards.

The material nature of hardware is barely any higher than that of software. Yes, you cannot just copy bits around, but you can take the same design and fabricate millions of chips for pennies. The cost of production for any given chip of Silicon has almost nothing to do with its material cost. It has everything to do with the amount of design work that went into it, just like software. None of that appreciably changes the benefits of cooperation vs competition.

There is no historical precedent other than the media industry, which uses the copyright system for an entirely different purpose: to milk as much as possible out of a single investment in time and effort, usually by someone else than the original creator.

The whole thing revolves around the marginal cost of an extra copy of a piece of software being close to zero, no other critical industry gets such economies of scale. Making more chips still requires huge capex and opex.

I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the fittest companies get bigger marketshare while the least fit companies go bankrupt, and the least fit species go extinct. So I guess you could say that the market functions as an ecosystem - maybe the word you were looking for was 'symbiosis' rather than cooperation? Cheetah's aren't cooperating with lions, they are competing - but relative to the rest of the ecosystem, they exist in a form of symbiosis.

Trade and money are just tools to facilitate cooperation. They incentivize agents to cooperate by sharing the value of that cooperation.

There are various forms of cooperation too. Lions merge with cheetahs to hopefully starve the leopards out, then they domesticate emus and antelopes so that they can survive scorching the rest of the savannah so they don't have to deal with those pesky wild dogs. Then they see tigers doing the same in India and say “hey let's agree that you can run rampant through Africa if we can run rampant through India, but we agree on these shared limits so that we are not in conflict.”

A favorite example is that us legislation to ban advertisements for smoking was sponsored by the tobacco industry. They were spending a lot on ads just to keep up with the Joneses; if Camel voluntarily stopped and Marlboro continued, then Camel would go the way of Lucky Strike. They would rather agree to cut their expenditures! But they needed to make sure no other young tobacco whippersnappers came in and started showing a couple ads which they would have to both best, reigniting the war.

Open source is interesting because it seems to be a marvelous unexpected outcome from the existence of the corporation. Individual people start to work at corporations and are aware that whatever they produce at that corporation is mortal, it will die with that corporation if that corporation decides to stop maintaining it or if that corporation itself folds. The individual wants his or her labor to survive longer, to become immortal. This company could go out of business and I will still have these tools at my next job. So in some sense layered self-interests create a push towards corporate cooperation.

'Survival of the fittest' when applied to groups implies cooperation as an essential skill between individuals. It's not all competition. The fittest group is not the one made of the most individually fit members, they also need to function well together.

"selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary."

-David Sloan & E. O. Wilson

To me, it seems as less of a sociological anomaly and more of an example of the quality of production outside the established competitive norms of capitalism. There are multiple such examples throughout history. The gift economy wasn't born with FOSS development.

There is a lot of literature on the subject of cooperation, especially from anarchist philosophers (i.e. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin).

> in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint.

I don't have the proper background to make a strong case about this, but I feel like middle ages guilds would be closer to the open-source model than to the current "trades secrets" one, wouldn't it?

Likewise, I don't see farmers of ye olde times keeping their crop-growing tricks to themselves as secrets and so on.

Furthermore, we've known about many indigenous cultures where "the tribe" is regarded as more important than the individual, meaning that sociologically they should be more aligned with the open-source model than the capitalistic one, shouldn't it?

Again, I'm not an expert in the area, but it seems to me that our current society is more "historically anomalous" at the commoner level than any more socially-conscious one would be (i.e.: common people has leaned to greed/individuality these days than almost always in the past).

Well, I'm yet to see a free (as in beer) lawyer, helping people for free after his regular workday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_bono

Reply on news.ycombinator.com