On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 9:18 AM <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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?
We've been there for quite a long time already, I'm afraid.
- Dan C.
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