El Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 07:10:13PM +0200, Paul Boddie deia:
Once again, I may have pledged for rewards in the campaign, but I'm not explicitly endorsing it. Everyone should weigh up the different factors and their own needs when supporting such efforts. However, it is worth noting that there are only 4 days left until the campaign ends:
ACK, the RYF or money back guarantee helps (I don't usually see the same hardware being offered with different software where only one option is RYF _and_ the RYF option getting more than double the demand than the next most popular option, that already says something of the community-to-be). But it's already difficult to tell somebody else what to spend their money on when you have used the device for a few months, in any crowdfunding it is wiser to just spread the word and let people make their own minds about it.
There has been a range of responses from enthusiasm about the modular computing concept and support for hardware that fully supports Free Software through to criticism about the performance and the ethical record of the system-on-a-chip vendor that happens to be used for the first card. Reading some of the responses, I note that maybe there is some kind of law of public discourse that the more severe the criticism, the less constructive it tends to be.
In some case it's been more constructive than others. Funny thing is that when an evil corporation launches another evil product, you can hardly hear some boohs somewhere, not because everybody likes it, but because everybody expected something of the kind. But when someone says to be trying to sell something good in an ethical way, everybody instantly disbelieves it so they're going to point out any possible objection to prove it is not perfect. That's useful to reinforce their inductive reasoning and saves them the trouble of having to apply deduction to every news piece they come across. In other words, they know these things don't happen, so they simply find confirmation of their knowledge and share it.
And to be honest, when something looks too good to be true it usually isn't true. The lack of features/performance and reputation of the SOC vendor, among other things, is what makes it not too good to be true, so somewhat likely to eventually be true.
- Whether EOMA68 (and its siblings) or something similar (see next point) has
a role to play in this, perhaps only as a step towards the eventual goal of a set of platforms we can rely on
I don't know if the EOMA-68 spec has much future or too little. But I think it has the potential to start (with others) a certain market niche for freedom respecting hardware. Manufacturing is a high volume thing, so it is very difficult to compete. They're aiming at a product that does not exist, so it does not have competitors already (the general concept is similar to phoneblocks, or even many dual Computer-on-module and peripheral mainboard, but the standarisation idea is not really available anywhere else). Incumbents could enter the market if they find a business there, but Luke is trying to define its market in a way that is less profitable long term for incumbents than their already existing markets, so is somewhat less likely.
Accordingly, the market should also be little profitable for Luke. But then it's a curious moment to start it:
- There's a certain saturation in the conventional market (first PC sales went down, then laptops, then tablets... )
- There's some slow down in moore law.
- There have been difficulty in finding new needs for the ever higher computing power of new devices, so "good enough" computing has a better chance than historically.
- There's unprecedented hindrances and antifeatures in most consumer available hardware (up to now you could more or less find some hardware to run with free software, now most software is designed to try to stop you from loading any free software or at least to stop you running 100% free software). Up to now we could use mainstream hardware, pay the same than anyone else for our computers, but use them in more or less freedom. But now those times are ending. Soon you'll have to go for libre hardware, free software, decentralized or P2P services and open content or go for closed hardware, proprietary software, centralized services and DRMed content. The first market may be small or non-existing depending on what we can do, but I find very difficult to prevent the second. I imagine unlikely the prices to be the same for both.
For me it is difficult to foresee whether EOMA-68 will fly, if it will last lots of time or be replaced by something else (hopefully as good or better), an evolution of the concept like EOMA-200 or whatever or something completely different. But I think it is already helping by discovering some demand for something like it. 1414 pledges.
- Whether there are other ongoing efforts in this area (not one-offs) that
just need more attention than they have been getting
A part from what you list there are efforts around minifree, libreboot and the like. That is, people can get fed up of buying new faster hardware with more antifeatures, and start recycling older hardware from the times when there were less and weaker antifeatures. This is intuitively a lot of effort and eventually will run out of usable hardware, but has several advantadges:
- you reap the benefits of mass production (with some discount since the hardware is old).
- you boycott current offerings. Instead of debating whether to buy a device with chips from an evil vendor or from another vendor that is evil in some other way, you buy second hand from another consumer and no new sales for the companies causing the problems.
- you get down of the treadmill instead of running ever faster. In as much as we struggle for computers as fast as mainstream we will be allowing society to keep pushing ever weightier content at us. At some point you simply have to tell your friends to not send you 12MB fotos of their holidays, tell your TV station that you don't really need 4K and will opt for lower res, tell your supermarket that you don't really need cloud connected mass-spectrometers in microchips inside your toilet paper, etc.
- off-topic benefits like waste reduction, less resource depletion, etc.
- Whether or when libre CPUs and SoCs might be viable choices for such
platforms
Hopefully one day they will. I don't know much about chip manufacturing but it looks like this needs the niche market bigger than it is now (or a chip that is attractive in different markets). I'd love to be wrong. In any case trying it is very useful in itself, regardless of whether it has more or less success. And those putting money on it probably know their chances better than I do.
- Whether some existing products are good-enough choices for hardware
platforms, even if they are not libre hardware or employ encumbered microarchitectures (which a lot of established products do, of course)
I don't know all existing products, but my experience is that almost none of the products you can easily buy new are useful. Interesting things are few and far between, in crowdfunding experiments, to be bought from the other side of the planet during certain time window, ever uncertain of their ability to sustain a community that keeps the thing alive... And of course if you get free software you don't get fair trade, or local economy, anonymous shopping, or your preferred payment options, or environmental sustainability or ...
I like the pyra-handheld.com though. It's a pity that they don't have a RYF version, but with a wifi USB dongle you could use it in freedom. It might eventually get 2d acceleration, but I don't know about video acceleration.
There's an interesting summary of processor suitability done for the criteria of EOMA68 that some might find interesting:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/picking-a-processor
"It should also be pretty clear that there is literally not a single processor that checks every single box! As in, there is not a single processor in the world that is eco-conscious, respects software freedom, is ethical and accessible. This is a pretty insane situation to be in, in the year 2016."
If the campaign failed, but the effort had spread awareness of this kind of obscure (to the general population) oligopoly and depressing products, it would already have been useful.
I was in fact surprised that so many people knew Allwinner as GPL violators. I'm also finding more people aware of secure boot, signed bootloaders and so on. So the word slowly spreads.
There needs to be a constructive debate about incrementally improving this situation. Instead of "I hate that processor" or "wait for my radical SoC I've just started designing", people need to help find products that uphold software freedom and privacy while also being usable (obtainable, for the most part) for small libre hardware projects. And there needs to be an appreciation that this work is not meant to create the "toy of the month" - a gadget that is fun for a while and then stashed away somewhere - but instead to build an environment where we shouldn't be constantly needing to urgently figure out what kind of hardware we can use that uphold our values.
Well some kind of wiki to document each chip and it's problems for low volume RYF libre hardware (MOQ, GPL violations, proprietary drivers, NDAs, etc.) would be something.
Just one quick note: for people hating Allwinner, there's the option to get an EOMA-68 laptop with a pass-through card. This does not work as a computer but can be plugged to something you have and use the "laptop" as a USB keyboard and mouse and HDMI screen. So you can plug your preferred SBC, HDMI stick, mobile phone or add a second screen to your laptop. Then you may use one less CPU and still enjoy a laptop form factor. And upgrade to a full cableless laptop if one day they sell a computer card with a CPU you don't boycott.
The campaign is now accelerating at 75% of funds and 95% of days, it must have been foresseen for 250 cards and 250 laptops. But the creator has stated that it would be viable with other quantities. Since there are already 487 (+ 40?) cards and some of the critical laptop components are also required for other products (like micro-desktop or breakout board) it seems the savings in one side could compensate the loses in the other if they get at least 100 orders for laptops (they're now at 97). So requesting a laptop kit may be more useful to the campaign (but more expensive for the backer) than requesting something else. In theory they shouldn't get any money if they don't reach 100% of pledges (36775$ left in 3 days, difficult), but in practice if the requested items can be produced with the pledged money, something should be possible to arrange.
I don't have an issue with people hating a processor. I think most new processors have earned hate, and hate is fine as long as you redirect it to good endeavours. I can understand boycotting Allwinner. And if then they boycott all the rest much the better. If they boycott Allwinner and buy Intel then I fail to understand.
I mean they stopped selling computers and they only sell traps. Fine, we stop buying computers. That'd be sane. Not always easy, but sane. At least saner that this addiction to ever more performance and features, at whatever privacy and control prices.
So, does anyone have any opinion about the kinds of projects (most likely being undertaken already) that need our attention or support?
I don't know. RISC-V ?
How do you envisage a sustainable computing platform?
I guess I'd need to envisage multiple sustainable fabs. That's the hard part. I think Open Source Ecology has not got there yet.
And since all discussions inevitably lament how much memory Firefox uses these days, how do you envisage a less demanding form of computing being extended to online services?
Err... an army of anti-sect therapists ?
Sorry for the long message!
long ?