For sure, but companies didn't win by building a better product. They won because of copyright laws that helped them to enforce their goal of profits.

If we want computing freedom, or in other words: consumer rights, then we need to enact laws that are pro-consumer to ensure an open future. Things like being able to repair our devices were taken away (Apple) and brought semi-back with right-to-repair laws (albeit only proposed atm), ownership of software and your data taken away by online services (Adobe, etc), and lots others.

Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard?

Laws are the only way to force everyone to play nice. We can have the nicest open source stack, but that's nothing if companies can just seize them with their own laws.

> Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard?

We need to get rid of those products and replace them with free software instead. It doesn't even matter if it's better or worse, as long as it's ours. This is the most sensible long term investment since it's the only thing that will truly benefit humanity forever.

I agree. The only reason these "stakeholders" have any leverage at all with which to push this is the fact semiconductor fabrication currently costs billions of dollars. So while it is possible for us to make our own freedom-respecting software, freedom-respecting hardware is out of our reach. Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in the hands of few corporations and those are friendly towards the copyright industry and good targets for government regulation and intervention.

Some kind of innovation that lets people fabricate at home is necessary. Just like the free software compiler changed the software world, the free as in freedom fab must do the same for computer hardware. Access to fabrication must somehow be democratized or we'll never be free.

Making fabrication accessible would definitely be nice.

In the meanwhile, I'd be interested in finding a community that puts "relatively open" hardware to good use. That includes old computers that won't grow antifeatures on their own, but also e.g. microcontrollers. I believe the dual-core 125MHz $1 Raspberry RP2040 is more powerful than my first PC was (although it might have less RAM and unfortunately can't be transparently expanded as far as I know). It's not exactly open hardware but it's well documented, and even the boot rom is open source (that is rare). You don't exactly have lots of integrated peripherals (e.g. ethernet) so it'd be very difficult for them to have some kind of remote backdoor. It's also quite simple to program; a hacker scale operating system is entirely feasible.

And that is of course just one of many choices out there. There are far more powerful microcontrollers out there. And by their nature, it's not going to be very easy for the copyright mafia to get their slimy tentacles between you and the core.

You'd give up a lot of power but on the other hand, I could buy 500 of them for the price of my laptop. I don't know, maybe we don't need to run everything on a single high performance CPU and could instead have a small cluster; perhaps each chip running its own application?

It's definitely not a "ready world" but I see lots of possibilities and am excited for the future of microcontrollers. But I'm also seeing the line between microcontrollers and processors getting blurred.

You could just use FPGAs. They aren't fast, but your homegrown chips won't be either.

Those are also fabricated by huge corporations. No guarantee they won't be compromised by industry or government interests.

True, but it's harder to compromise a fully programmable device. In essence, you'd have to somehow prevent certain kinds of programming while still permitting all the rest. How is the device to know that flipping pin 121 and 122 in a specific pattern is actually clocking bits from a storage device?

I think the web is broken (user-hostile) for the same reason. It's been made to support arbitrary programming, and now you have to play this weird cat and mouse game of trying to prevent a particular kind of programming -- that can be used against you -- without breaking all the rest of the web. Google can block your browser because they can run code in your browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512

You're right. I understand now that it could be a huge step forward. Not perfect but great.

Furthermore I would add that the silicon die of an FPGA has a particular look which is very homogeneous compared to the die of a CPU or microcontroller, so if the vendor is including a small malicious CPU as a physical part of the FPGA, you should be able to detect that just by carefully scrutinizing the die with a microscope.

It does seem to some extend the higher the level of abstraction, the more potential for inappropriate controls or restrictions. More restrictions exist in apps vs OS vs cpu, or in cloud services like gdrive vs an EBS volume on AWS. So FPGAs are at least a step closer to free (or harder to secure). Even if they are under control of the manufacturer, there is a lot more flexibility and less potential for "oversight" at the gate level.

There is still the question of all the peripherals, I'd be worried about internet and video and other i/o adapters only being compatible with proprietary hardware, and impossible to use with a home programmed fpga

Depending on what your performance target is, you might do without adapters. Low speed USB can be bitbanged even with 8-bit attiny. RP2040 with PIO can run DVI, 720p@30Hz (though you do need to overclock the chip heavily). I don't know how to implement Ethernet with digital logic (it uses pulse amplitude modulation) but bandwidth-wise it's not too challenging. Gigabit signals to PHY are 125MHz using RGMII. I think 100Mbit Ethernet would use 25MHz but I'm not actually sure. All doable using commodity microcontrollers without an FPGA.

I could see a long road to a dystopia where these legacy protocols are deprecated and they push out devices that only speak new protocols that won't let unapproved devices talk.. but I'm not that pessimistic. I can't see the copyright mafia chasing things down so far, and they'd rail up against all the industrial users.

There are people trying to make hardware more open source and user friendly for the average user right now. The Framework laptop, for example, is not a perfect product with DIY silicon but it's well on it's way to open, repairable hardware, open bare iron code, and other user-friendly attributes.

It's also quite expensive because by definition such things will always be more expensive. Vote with your wallet and not just your HN post and you'll push the world just the tiniest bit in the direction you want.