On Mon, May 18, 2026, at 02:52, [email protected] wrote: > The tech industry is trying very hard to build an ugly future.
I’m increasingly concerned about a broader architectural shift in which responsibilities traditionally handled by the operating system are being pushed down into firmware or firmware-adjacent layers, reducing the OS’s role as the system’s primary and ultimate point of control. As that boundary shifts, the operating system is no longer the highest practical authority over the machine, but increasingly a constrained runtime operating under policies, initialization logic, and security decisions defined below it. For open source projects, this subtly but meaningfully changes their role. Even fully transparent operating systems may depend on opaque firmware for core behaviors like boot integrity, device initialization, power management, and security enforcement. That reduces the scope of end-to-end auditability and weakens the OS’s ability to serve as the final arbiter of system behavior. Over time, open source systems risk evolving from sovereign controllers of hardware into policy-bound execution environments where their openness still matters but no longer guarantees full control over the system stack. If we reach that point, what meaningful agency would remain for the user in operating a computer, and would that level of constrained control still justify calling it a general-purpose system? ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T073a994fa2fd80d1-M626e9f3cc3c917628d82e660 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
