alt Hacker NewsYeah. Manufacturers are simultaneously pricing and locking us out of silicon. Computers are moving back to big iron tier mainframes, and it looks like remote attestation is the future so any non-corporate owned device will be essentially useless. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it, or if we're ostracized from digital society should we figure out how to run it.
Everything that everyone who believed in free software worked towards is being destroyed. There is no way to fight back unless we figure out how to fab computers in garages. It was all for nothing. The future is bleak.
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whstl • today at 8:59 PM
This is doubly bad with, in some cases, governments, banks and other institutions pretty much forcing us to own those locked-in devices to run their apps.
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This is why I hope more people start to get behind the 'Perma computing' movement.
https://permacomputing.net/
Even if you don't agree with the exact political stances of the authors, the broad goals are notable.
I have said it for years now, perma-computing is the missing piece of the free software movement. There is no point in the software being complete free/open if you have hardware that is locked down.
Maybe one day, we will be fabing our computers, maybe not on a garage scale but on a much more local manufacturer scale. Similar to how you can get PCB's custom made but with open processor designs. Nothing too amazing but if you could pick or supply a chip design and have something made on a 300nm node or whatever, that is still a lot of power to the people. Chips that top out at a few million transistors not billion/trillions.
You can do computing up to the level of the mid 90's, which is neat but that is the big trade off you need to make.