Will open firmware exist in 5 years? Linux 4.2 related.
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http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2015-08/msg00010.html
If you have been following the latest kernel and technology in general the past month or so, there have been plenty of stories about how hardware is becoming more locked down.
1. Intel's Skylake will not offer free/open source firmware
2. AMD's cards work best with non-free firmware and are pushing blobs into the 4.2 kernel
3. Nvidia's cards work best with non-free firmware and like AMD, are pushing blobs into the 4.2 kernel. Also, the 900 series doesn't play nice with Nouveau and to solve that, the team may consider requiring non-free signed firmware from Nvidia as Nvidia is not giving in.
4. An older story, but we heard about how the FCC in the US will not allow custom firmware for WiFi devices in fear of tampering of signals. It is now forbidden.
5. Where are the 802.11ac devices that support free firmware? I haven't seen them!
With all these stories (and I am sure there are more), things are actually worse off now than before with regard to new hardware. When people build computers and want to use new hardware, we are finding out that this new hardware isn't as freedom friendly as the hardware we may have bought years ago. This is for the people that actually want a traditional PC. Phones and tablets are about as non-free as it gets and are a growing trend.
What will change this? Are we going to have to start building our own processors, motherboards, and video cards to keep the dream alive? Or are we going to have to deal with it and when it gets to the point of no return, just give up on computers in general?
" Are we going to have to start building our own processors, motherboards, and video cards to keep the dream alive? "
with these new FCC rules you may not be able to make your own hardware unless you lock it down :(
If people can somehow figure out how to smuggle drugs, weapons, and people into the country I'm sure we can figure out how to smuggle illegal hardware, too.
well its the fact that if you want to make the hardware you must own a very very expensive factory for doing so
so its not as easy as smuggling drugs
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I won't advocate for this at the moment as its self-defeating and thinking "we can just make our own hardware and smuggle it in" isn't a feasible option. You need cooperation that we already don't have. If we did we'd have more free software firmware- or at least leaks of the code. We don't. And the way things are going what you can get around *without a lot of reverse engineering effort put in* potentially won't be possible tomorrow because of locks (signature checking of the firmware). Unless you have some magical way of getting those keys leaked even if we can reverse engineer it (we can't, not really, not on a wide scale anyway) then the resulting code won't run anyway.
The law is getting worse around the world. There is news that not only is the FCC looking to further force manufacturers to lock down wifi, and thus pretty much everything in practice, equivalent organizations (Canada and Europe) in other countries have identical or similar rules they are working on.
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If anybody hasn't been following along *you can do something* right now. Everybody here should go to www.savewifi.org or the savewifi libreplanet page (cached due to a ton of traffic crashing libreplanet.org server) and read the instructions on how to submit a comment to the FCC in opposition to the current proposed rules that ban *free software* pretty much everywhere. This won't be the end of it because there are already rules in place, but we need a mass of support to push the FCC to react, let alone listen to us.
Submit a comment even if it is "I object to these rules" because [select reason from list at savewifi.org].
It's not the length of the post that matters. It's the number of people showing they're being negatively impacted. The FCC is required to determine a rule changes impact. At this point they've said "it won't impact many people so we can do it". This is wrong and showing that will give us ammunition to go in and say "you haven't followed your own rules".
There are already representatives of savewifi which include *important people from pretty much every impacted group* that will figure out the details and propose a solution and are talking with the FCC. However you need to get in your comment now if things are going to be changed. You will weaken our defences if you do nothing.
* Note: "Open firmware" != free firmware
I fear open firmware may cease to exist much sooner, and the lack of freedom-respecting wifi cards is not as bad as no free cpus... considering where Intel and AMD are going.
We need to take action
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There are people working on these issues. Relax! Success or failure will depend on future fund-raisers and what happens with companies upstream (ie those designing CPUs and SOCs). The later we can't necessarily fix as the costs would be exorbitant. However we can design a non-X86 system without most of the biggest issues with the modern X86 options.
Right now I think the biggest unsolved problem or at least one that I'm not seeing an immediate solution for is next-generation wifi. There may be some hacks to solve this problem, but these are not ideal solutions, expensive, and more or less just a means of pulling the wool over our eyes. What I want to see at the end of the day is source code for the firmware under a free software license not some hack that "solves" the freedom issue by turning it into a hardware problem.
I am once again reminded of http://files.jxself.org/build.ogv
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RMS is almost spot on in the clip. We will need to design stuff from the ground up, but it's going to go beyond just a case and a motherboard. Right now we don't even have components which we can use and the direction is such that those who are in a position to design and manufacture said components are going in a direction where we can't dictate whats on the motherboards of tomorrow (ie SoC, which stands for a system on a chip, and if that chip contains everything, well... you no longer get to dictate what goes into that motherboard because nobody else will want another separate wifi chip when there is one that comes with the SoC). As a result I think what he is saying actually utterly underestimates the difficulty/cost of it all. This isn't going to be just a little money that needs to be raised. It's going to exceed the capability of anything we can foreseeably raise as a community.
We need funding like that which has never been raised in the history of fund-raisers. We need to design CPUs, wireless chips, and more. And even that won't make us free. We have governments which are forcing proprietary software on us via regulations now. This is going to get much much worse.
Entire governments with military incentives to do so seem to be unable to produce there own chips at a cost effective price point. To suggest we can succeed here [in free'ing everything] is likely unrealistic even if we can produce successful businesses models to fund engineers, build plants / or outsource it, and manufacture in quantities needed to make it cost effective.
To give people an idea it might take 100,000+ wifi cards a year to keep manufacturing going of a discontinued chipset. At this number your likely then going to pay $30 a card, which might be 3-6 times what it cost prior, and then selling something at a $60 price point that is a generation or more old? It doesn't work economically and you won't have demand within the free software world to do it. Even if you take into account all GNU/Linux users (not just free software advocates) it's going to be extraordinary unlikely. Your talking about needing to get 1/5 of all GNU/Linux users to agree to buy only one particular wifi card and do so from a single source. We're not even 1/10 of the way to that number now.
* The numbers I pulled off the top of my head, but they're not unrealistic for quotes I've received on what it would take to make it happen.
Now there might be a cheaper way to go. You could possibly get discontinued chipsets and build wifi cards in smaller quantities for a lot less after its discontinued. Maybe. It there are surplus that is which you can locate and all that. But your not actually manufacturing the wifi chip part then so it's still a dead end. Your not going to get 100,000 sales a year of a dated wifi card.
I think there is a better chance of buying the copyright or getting a company that designs these chips to license a version of the code under a free software license. If (that is a big if) you have 100,000 cards a year sold and you take $1 from each that's $500,000 to fund purchasing the copyrights/get someone to take interest in re-licensing. Keep in mind I have no idea what it would cost/take to incentivize a company financially. I'm merely speculating here. A team of half dozen engineers though working for a year might run $500,000 I'd guestimate. It seems more likely to me that a company designing these wifi chipsets would be willing to take that than us succeeding in designing a wifi chipset and getting it manufactured. From there your talking about adding a mere $1 cost to every modern wifi chip which would then be price competitive with competing proprietary products on the market....anyway... even if you got the source you may not be able to run a build of the code on future chips because of FCC and other regulatory rules that are changing as I write this. See www.savewifi.org and help fix it!
Anyway- just rumbling thoughts here and someone else may have a better idea of the actual costs than I. I think right now we're still at 'fund someone at $100,000 to reverse engineer a wifi chipset' currently. However that would be for 802.11ac, not a future chipset. And I'm not 100% sure this will work because the FCC is talking about getting companies to re-license stuff and the new rules require locks... so.. yea- yikes.
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