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Comment by bheadmaster | Hacker News Reader

Technology gatekeeping is completely antithetical to the hacker spirit.

Hackers built all this technology. There's no way a handful of megacorps are going to take it all for themselves.

Right, like no megacorp ever prevented us from doing whatever we want for our smartphones. Oh wait. (No Pixels don't count, unless you can write your own TEE, your own sensor hub, and your own wake up word)

I'm not saying they can't try, and succeed for a while. But eventually, we will always break free.

Pixel exists (but apparently doesn't count because it's not perfect yet).

Librem exists.

PinePhone exists.

More will exist in the future.

The "Librem is to iPhone as Stable Diffusion is to DALL-E" analogy breaks down when you consider that Librem phone works about 10% as well as an iPhone, whereas SD works 110% as well as DALL-E.

Linux also used to be a "hobby" OS. Now it powers the internet. Things change.

It took Linux a couple of decades to get to that point. And it had immense business value in having such a massive infrastructure open for everyone.

For hardware our world is not there yet and won't be for quite a forseeable future.

"open source" hardware is never going to work the same way as open source software does. Hardware is fundamentally capital-intensive to produce. Software can be produced (compiled) using hardware that many people have readily available. This is a fundamental, intractable difference.

It's the difference between free knitting patterns and free cardigans.

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