[smoldesu]

marcan seems to be part of a new breed of hacker, less interested in the "why" we do it and more interested in the "how" of it. Works pretty well for tackling a challenge like blindly picking at a black-box ISA/SIP, but I don't think his project has the kind of ideological understanding that keeps the libre desktop alive. Getting it to work is one thing; building a community to maintain your work is another.

Unfortunately, that's going to constitute a lot of the people you encounter these days. Half-measures are better than no-measures, but I really do miss the days of vigilant software development instead of cleaning up Apple's scraps.

[kmeisthax]

You're not giving Hector Marcan enough credit. He was on Team Twiizers and fail0verflow; groups that did a lot of hacking to open up closed systems. It's not like he's unaware of the customer abuse that happens in the proprietary world.

The "look beyond freedom" quote probably should also be looked at with the context that he's talking about the FSF, which has an odd habit of being extremely absolutist in ways that actually hurt the user. Like, they'll point out that Wi-Fi cards with proprietary firmware are bad, but then endorse very similar hardware where the firmware blob is in ROM or some features are lasered off just to conform to the "proprietary ROMs don't count" rule. Marcan is arguing for creating a gradual sliding scale of "proprietary, user-hostile, and/or insecure" to "Free, user-respecting, and/or secure" and then looking at the trade-offs between them, rather than just creating a really high bar based on what made sense in the late 1980s and sticking to it forever.

[smoldesu]

I'm giving the dude all the credit he deserves. fail0verflow is amazing, the stuff they did with Nvidia Tegra/Nintendo Switch was nothing short of miraculous and insane; that doesn't change the cards at the table though, and it doesn't make me any less skeptical of where all this leads. Again, I've got no intention of stopping people who are making progress, even if it's progress I disagree with, but he still has to prove himself here, and I'm not entirely confident that we're going to end up with "Linux, but on the M1" without a number of asterisks trailing the statement. That was the case with the Switch, that was the case with the PS4, and it's unfortunately crawling in that direction for the M1 as well.

[marcan_42]

I fail to see how you can equate the Switch and PS4, platforms designed to disallow the user from running their own OS, and where the manufacturer actively works to stop any such attempts, to the M1, where the manufacturer actively invested in developing the infrastructure required to allow users to securely boot their own OS.

If you're talking about building a sustainable community so the end product is polished and upstreamed and ready for end users, I'd say we have that with the M1. Things are already getting upstreamed and there is more than enough momentum. This wasn't the case with PS4, which was just me and a few other fail0verflow folks putting together a proof of concept. It helps when you don't have to spend cycles finding exploits and can focus on delivering a working OS :)

[kaba0]

> less interested in the "why" we do it and more interested in the "how" of it.

I mean, to be honest, someone only knowing “whys” alone is kind of disappointing — especially combined with the often seen narcissism of developers and you get someone who does not understand the problem domain spewing bullshit about it with confidence. We can see plenty of examples to that under any firefox, wayland or systemd threads.