Technology

TL;Dr licensed firmware is garbo - open firmware ftw

This - is what we need.

The only ones who can really push the envelope on getting RISC-V into the hands of consumer, and indeed up to an IPC comparable to ARM, are companies like Deep Computing and Si-Five.

The biggest problem in the computing world, bar none, are not the predatory companies, vendor lockins, or proprietary operating systems, it's always been licensing. This is why BSD existed in the first place, because a $1000 a month per seat to copy a file without pulling and pushing bits around is a bit too much, even if it was the 70s.

Similarly, in a time of green washing, eWaste and even planned obsolescence, one of the things that help to underpin all of these afformentioned evils is secret sauce firmware.

No matter what you say, if you don't have access to the source code for firmware and bootloaders, you've got a lifetime set by the vendor based on how long they can actually support the hardware - because employees cost money. You can't realistically expect a company to support something they're not making money on anymore, and they'd most likely just want to sell you new hardware.

This is where RISC-V comes in swinging. I'm not saying that all RISC-V hardware will come with open firmware, but the ball is rolling and with it we can finally bridge the gap spanned by tech companies, where the average Jane or Joe can in effect easily modify their firmware code, albeit through security principles of course.

Unlike Open Source, Open Firmware is a bit trickier. Decades of industrial precedent, and indeed vendor lockins the OEM's are beholden to, like proprietary BIOS, makes it that much harder to establish - especially when designing an entire ISA and getting it to prefab is a Lord of the Rings length journey. There is no griffin shortcut.

No doubt I'll have naysayers. Just mentioning open firmware in the average matrix chat riles the gallery, as is the style, but even the likes of NVIDIA are opening up their code (thanks, AI) to the point where NVK is not that far from stable, untainting your kernel. Yay.

Everybody ♥️ open source, don't they? But how about giving some love to Open Firmware? In the FUTURE 🐙 we'll hopefully have vendors and foreign interests shoved tf out of our hardware, and good riddance, because they shouldn't be in control of it in the first place.

I await your ire.

And shout outs to the libreboot maintainer. What in the ever loving Carmack is FSF up to? Libre ain't a brand, it's a philosophy.