Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 09/13/2013 02:59 PM:
If people know how their hardware works, then some competitor can come along and create similar hardware at a lower price point. Provided an open source effort can come along and make a sort of similar VHDL design that puts them out of business, it's all good.
Right. So, it would work fairly well without a requirement for absolute transparency.
Most anarcho-capitalists aren't that, of course, they are capitalists, and expect public investment to be there to protect their IP for them, through copyrights, patents, and so on. The GPU vendors want an interface like OpenCL so that they can keep people away from the actual design. That's annoying, and misrepresents the concept of `open' for their own selfish purposes.
Well, to be fair, copyrights and patents have to be defended by their owners using the public infrastructure as a lever. If you're too poor to defend your own property, that public infrastructure is worthless to you. Some of the larger organizations often argue that _they_ are the primary source of the public infrastructure in the first place. So, it's not quite as cut and dried. But you're right, these capitalists are not anarcho-capitalists by any stretch. They want state-corp integration ... preferably asymmetric integration.
Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not capital.
I disagree. Membership in the set of cabal _tools_ ... the technically competent person, comes from cognitive investment. Ownership/control of those tools comes from capital, usually in the form of "golden handcuffs". What percentage of geeks do you know that wouldn't opt for a 6 figure salary in exchange for their indentured servitude? ... at least for a little while? Membership in the actual cabal requires you to be able to own/control the tools, which means you need money to pay them some sort of competitive salary (or perhaps lavish them with avant technology). In some rare cases, you can exert control through charisma or machiavellian manipulation. But that's the exception, not the rule.
I've worked on a variety of types of code, and I don't find I need to appeal to individuals controlling teams of people and domain experts to understand the parts I'm interested in. There's a scale free property to good codes that makes it possible to understand them. Understand the goals, inputs, the outputs, and starting building out an understanding.. If there is no source code it is much more difficult (but not impossible).
Again, for the most part, I agree. But you have to remember two things 1) you're not the average and 2) the _types_ matter. For example, it's one thing to be curious about, say, operating systems. But it's another thing, entirely, to be curious about cryptographic systems. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella Among the metal ones a messenger will soon arrive.
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