Although true for purists, pragmatists might take the blobs if the open core had stuff like IO/MMU to mitigate some risk. There’s definitely stuff happening on demand side. That’s good news.

“totally open” only matters to us mad scientist types who want to tinker with EVERYTHING

Openness also seems to matter to the cloud business? Judging by Google’s interest in things like LinuxBoot and POWER at least.

(Waited till I got home to respond to this. It deserves more effort. :)

It’s good to be cautious about it. There’s all kinds of ways to look at morality. I feel you on that. As I thought about it, I realized there was a lot of common ground among the majority of people. Focusing on that could help.

So, an easy one to leverage that’s already established in our intuition and legal system is fraud. An evil company promises one thing to the seller but doesn’t deliver it at all or as promised. This might be performance, quality, support/service, or something where screwups are easy to assess. An extension of this is the company tries to use legal or technological means to prevent customers from assessing that or shut down negative reports. I mean, a fundamental assumption for the market for goods is you should know what you’re getting, have a chance at assessing its value, and complete a transaction on it.

We could nail lots of companies with just that rule. Especially in EDA or embedded SoC’s where they try to use NDA’s on all kinds of things. From there, I might add protocols or storage formats have to be open to block lockin. It also preserves competitiveness by allowing solutions to be plug and play. We might also reduce copyright, patent, or EULA restrictions on basis that owners only get such protections if they’re acting reasonable. One example is Oracle wanting a billion dollars for a few lines of code in a system depending on millions of them or twenty something per phone when profit is around thirty with their patent being one of 250,000. Obviously, these numbers in no way represent Oracle’s contribution to the platform. Even a dollar a patent would be more than the funding of a startup in that sector. We can look at stuff like that, even progressive schemes where people pay as they grow. We can be flexible. Thing is, the greedy companies are so epically full of shit that even basic, common sense stuff will knock out lots of their schemes while minimally affecting well-run companies or true innovators.

“Is capitalism inherently bad?”

Yes if you’re going by the interpretation of always increasing gain for yourself at expense of others with no limit. It provably leads to evil on a massive scale. When you combine that with capitalist media, it gets worse in a self-sustaining way. One [biased] source I like on it just for the anecdotes is the documentary The Corporation. I listed some highlights from it in this comment answering a similar question.

“There exist companies like System76 and Purism that cater to the “truly open” market, but the fact is most people simply don’t care and arguably they SHOULDN’T care so long as their needs are being met. “totally open” only matters to us mad scientist types who want to tinker with EVERYTHING. “

The people who built the proprietary systems of the richest, tech companies usually had source and/or hardware control. The creatives probably wouldn’t do as good a job if their already-paid service started showing them ads more often. The TPM-powered solutions industry wanted stopping most forms of sharing, making you pay for stuff multiple times, not letting you record stuff, and so on would probably be opposed by the masses. Most companies locked in to inferior products that they built stuff on long ago don’t like that fact so much as tolerate it out of necessity. It hurts their ability to move fast and profit off of things.

You can find a lot of damage that always-closed platforms do vs open, tinkerable ones if you focus on peoples needs, wants, and goals. A well-designed, commercial platform that had source where third-parties can extend or integrate it will always have more potential for those people than one that’s arbitrarily limited. People don’t care since tech people don’t speak their language focusing on their goals. I’ve been learning to do that over past few years. I mean, it will still be an uphill battle. I’m just saying things like I just wrote get “Oh yeah, that’s aggravating!” or “That could be really cool!” reactions from people instead of blank stares wondering whether to be impressed, confused, or annoyed by impenetrable jargon or politics that can’t mean anything in real world. If value proposition was same, people almost always prefer the device which also let them fix it cheap, customize it easily (maybe via friend or company), not leak their stuff, and not force unnecessary upgrades. Or make them buy a new charger. ;)

There are more people that care about “totally open” than tinkerers. You have a coalition between tinkerers, people who believe closed source software and/or lockdown is unethical, and people for whom blobs pose an unacceptable security hazard.

Raptor is apparently a major customer of their own Talos II product, due to untenable security concerns around unauditable blobs on x86.

This is actually the danger. There will always be a need for machines for developers to use, but the risk is that these machines and the machines for everyone else (who the market seems to think don’t “need” actual control over their computers) will diverge increasingly. “Developer” machines will become more expensive, rarer, harder to find, and not something people who aren’t professional developers (e.g. kids) own.

We’re already seeing this happen to some extent. There are a large number of people who previously owned PCs but who now own only locked down smartphones and tablets (moreover, even if these devices aren’t locked down, they’re fundamentally oriented towards consumption, as I touched on here).

Losing the GPC war doesn’t mean non-locked-down machines disappearing; it simply means the percentage of people owning them will decline to a tiny percentage, and thus social irrelevance. The challenge is winning the GPC war for the general public, not just for developers. Apathy makes it feel like we’ve already lost.

Arguably iPhones are dev friendly in a limited way. if you’re willing to use Xcode, you can develop for your iPhone all you want at no charge.

The freedoms guaranteed by free software were always deeply abstruse and inaccessible for laypeople.

Your GNOME desktop can be 100% GPL and it will still be nearly impossible for you to even try to change anything about it; even locating the source code for any given feature is hard.

That’s not to say free software isn’t important or beneficial—it’s a crucial and historical movement. But it’s sad that it takes so much expertise to alter and recompile a typical program.

GNU started with an ambition to have a user desktop system that’s extensible and hackable via Lisp or Scheme. That didn’t really happen, outside of Emacs.

This is correct. Purism routinely exaggerates about what they are able to provide in terms of openness, without any plausible way of actually delivering. It’s quite tiresome.

Not only will Librem 5 have blobs, they’ve now shamelessly announced they intend to use a loophole to procure FSF RYF certification despite this. If this is allowed to stand, it also makes RYF rather meaningless.

As a Fairphone user: the market is made by buying the damned phones.

I wish there was an official Sailfish distro. I’m a happy user of the community port, but I also tolerate some glitches. Like not being able to calibrate the proximity sensor or run android apps.

But, as stated, they do have a non-Google android for those who want to be closer to the mainstream and a Google android for people who don’t care that much.

See the article. Most of what is said also applies to AMD, and according to the linked Phoronix post, they entered into similar agreements to be able to provide the same DRM functionality.

I’m guessing by “really need” mainframe-level isolation you just mean the feature set. In that case, it is a good feature set that many have tried to approximate in homebrew situations. The last project doing it also ended up exploring Lua. I want to look at your first requirement, though, since I’m not sure it’s necessary.

“My response is; a container is at the minimum one process, how many processes can one machine host, 100s, 1000s? Point is there’s a limit imposed by hardware. “

The traditional solution to this was a load-balancing cluster. They were down to microsecond latencies on some network cards even back in the day. You can have the load balancer distributing the requests across machines or a master machine driving the worker machines. You get as much processing as you have hardware.

The times when this doesn’t work is if one application needs more RAM than one system can have or even microsecond latencies are unacceptable. This is rarely a problem given the distributed components we have these days. Yet, the solution in the past was not mainframes but NUMA machines like SGI’s UV. They run Linux these days, too. Today’s big x86 servers are a lot like older NUMA machines. There’s also special-purpose devices that can connect them into NUMA machines. There were also so-called Distributed, Shared Memory (DSM) machines that emulated the NUMA model across a low-latency, high-performance cluster. CompSci had a few prototypes for doing that on x86 that were FOSS licensed.

So, consider load-balancing clusters, Beowulf clusters, NUMA machines, and DSM before “mainframes” since mainframes have a very, specific meaning with associated cost, restrictions, lock-in, etc.

“Toward that end I’ve been playing around with sand boxing lua”

Although I don’t have original work, I did find the Supple sandbox doing a search. Another approach from high-assurance security was combining a separation or microkernel OS with lightweight runtimes with each component running in its own partition communicating with IPC-based middleware. The Barracuda Application Server is only commercial attempt I know that used a combo of INTEGRITY RTOS, C-based apps, and Lua-based apps. If they did typical usage, the Lua-based apps would run in a dedicated partition with time and space partitioning. They could’ve bullshitted, though. FOSS options for that include Muen separation kernel, Genode, and the L4’s. That’s on top of any Linux-based solution you might go with for maturity and ease of use.