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Comment by landofredwater | Hacker News Reader

Open source hardware is a great idea, but most of the executions have been pretty shoddy with stuff like proprietary parts still being used, bad documentation, and worst of all some companies just releasing products with no actual sourcing at all.

I've been very happy with ZSA for example, and they've done it right in my opinion.

Hopefully more companies work on making their stuff open standards with strong centralized production for those that don't want to build it themselves rather than arbiters of what can and cannot be reproduced by 3rd parties.

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Proprietary parts aren't necessarily bad, it just depends on why they're proprietary - if it's just to go-to-market faster, it's fair to criticize the decision, but often there are legitimate downsides that would result in less-than-ideal compromises in terms of performance or features. Hopefully such companies doing this are transparent and will answer inquiries into why they made these parts decisions.

By proprietary, I more meant the "only certain people can get access" more than the part itself being open to tinker at that sort.

Think the weird random chips apple uses more than the fact that 90% of CPUs on market aren't totally open; one is still clearly more accessible.

> Think the weird random chips apple uses more than the fact that 90% of CPUs on market aren't totally open; one is still clearly more accessible.

The random chips are their competitive advantage - Intel chips are notoriously power-inefficient, and AMD chips are still x86 which is an inefficient architecture. The only difference is that you can't build your own M2 computer, which isn't exactly moving any goalposts besides Apple opening themselves up to the grueling, low-margin work of setting up logistics for their different SKUs of chips, working with board partners to define specifications, and dealing with supporting the utterly random hardware people plug into their PCIe lanes (Macs 'work' in that Apple has rigorous test cases for 99% of scenarios; Windows had so many driver problems throughout Windows 7, 8, and 10 because MSFT to maintain backwards compatibility for components from 2002; this is why W11 has mostly dropped official support for older CPUs).

Intel is x86(_64) as well, mostly (rumors of plans to make an ARM competitor to Nvida and Apple).

And yes, not being able to make your own M2 computer does make the chip less open.

Open-ness is a scale, and if you're going to call something "open-source hardware" you should be able to source the hardware entirely yourself. Not being able to do that is closed hardware.

EDIT: clarified the "mostly"

ZSA has some openness in their software, but their hardware (and it is a hardware company) is closed.

That's part of the reason why my ZSA gear is gathering dust in silence, but my Prusa gear runs 24 hours a day and everyone who will listen knows about it.

Principles matter.

ZSA configurator so much better than QMK configuration, it's not even a remote comparison.

I happily pay money to companies who provide a lot of additional value on top of open source offering. I have moonlander, zsa platform, ergodox ez. When ZSA (inevitably, as for me) will release concave moonlander, I'm going to buy it too...

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