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>But I see no need for holistic systems as described in that talk, I just see a need for better, more transparent systems. And a system doesn't have to be holistic to be transparent, or good.

my takeaway is that it's not the holistic systems themselves that are needed -- it's that when holistic systems aren't enforced that vendors will go mad with power.

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IBM Z systems are arguably the most holistic systems currently available, everything down to the silicon is designed in a coherent way. And yet, it is all incredibly proprietary.

Holistic systems don't prevent vendors from going mad with power. Competition and pressure to document their products does.

But it's terrible power for them because now they have to maintain that firmware, and that's very expensive, so they don't do a good job of it at all, and we can pretend it's OK right up until it's not.

Legal liability for broken, unmaintained firmware would very quickly bring about the world that BMC wants.

Legal liability for the madness of alarming confusing systems in the flight control room when the airplane goes down with more than 200 lives lost in the sea is about half the yearly income of an exec's $400K.

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