-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 01/31/2017 12:52 PM, Philipp Stanner wrote: > Well, these are sad news. > I'm surprised that the amount of blobs is so high in modern hardware. > Without desiring to criticize or judge the project: What's the goal for > the future, when even you admit that there's no great difference in > technical aspects to vendor firmware? > The sole purpose of free hardware may be honorable, but my personal > believe is that efficiency is more important to people.
Note: I don't speak for the project here, these are just my thoughts... I would think that coreboot's future lies in a non-x86 direction. The only two general purpose x86 vendors are targeting consumers and small business, remain heavily tied to Microsoft, and really have no reason to offer libre-friendly systems when their primary market is going to use pre-packaged software. Even better, by adding "security" and requiring signing keys to boot said prepackaged software, some additional revenue can be generated from the software vendors. It's interesting that you bring up efficiency as the end user's primary goal; in our experience inexpensiveness linked with ease of use are the primary goals of a typical end user. As a result, libre software is increasingly marginalised; I don't think libre software as we know it will easily survive the transition to cloud services. Sure, there will be exceptions like Launchpad that are released under the AGPL, but in general the trends are very clear -- the masses are clamoring for everything to be cloud based, and the manufacturers / software vendors are more than happy to comply as not only does no IP need to be released (either in source or binary form), but a steady revenue stream is virtually guaranteed -- if not from direct leasing fees, then from personal data mining and sale of targeted advertisements. I predict libre software will be relegated to a (licensed?) userspace component on consumer systems at some point. Libre software as we know it may live on in retrocomputing and certainly in large business (cloud providers), but its heyday is over. Just my $0.02 :D - -- Timothy Pearson Raptor Engineering +1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line) +1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard) https://www.raptorengineering.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJYkN7xAAoJEK+E3vEXDOFb/M0H/0/oBhA/ZSVf63MPUWThFzMC VVh9H+ef9yDCXOfAUynfLeqVmjXRvHxdh1s8bPVoCJ5eGKjzf9WArBb1DlyZHkUh NwTAz2B0tUoDHRg9jSXWBS7gG3XD+Q8LwwBzcPkw9kHnaBsitiM9kLrw9zPLXxBx IGYjt/vaxYW/lFzuEo5aWGdqtu+uC1PyGu5BpZIeMnWVDULCq2bVITQgqDmzYBJX Dltdl0fo13DPvbE4SuuDoRSLR6ESyysBZmYuTdyi6wzgSGjiJKaYdTyTkiFCIB2/ OzshCfOT791O8BmYx94YK0SmcZFSilUgXlZXwUXcHbtxVC/ummxcUYv/JM4r+hY= =V1t1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- coreboot mailing list: [email protected] https://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
