| For the same reason I cared to run linux even before we had open BIOS. Would you have been shouting at young Torvalds that he was wasting his time trying to write a free OS in a world of proprietary hardware? We won't get to a fully open ecosystem in a day. It wont be a single project, and the more experimental parts you add to the platform, the higher the cost you pay in instability, complexity of maintenance, and performances. I am not always running windows. But I have it installed for when I have to test aginst it. I am not a dissident, a journalist or a spy, so my threat model is not the NSA or PCC prying on my contact list. My threat model is the scenario "Microsoft and a random hardware vendor team up to make sure <Technology X> can never work on linux" which history has shown to be a credible one. Actors like System 76 fight against it and I am grateful. Getting CPUs, motherboards, GPU and drive drivers provably clean and incapable of spying is a magnitude harder, starts being feasible, but so far I am not in a category where I absolutely need that. I am pretty happy that some people start offering that too but it helps no one to pretend that people working on these parallel lines are somehow opposed. That's a self-defeating attitude! |
Yeah. It wouldn't have stopped him, probably just made him want an open platform even more.