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apatheticonion • today at 6:12 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Unless regulators enforce (at the very least) that hardware documentation sufficient to produce open source firmware/drivers must be supplied with that hardware, no - probably not.

Drivers and firmware are the biggest hurdle outside of locked bootloaders for competition in the operating system space.

Examples; Anything Apple (MacBook, iPhone), anything Samsung, anything Google, the list goes on.

There _is_ open hardware, but it has poor performance / battery / build quality and the vast majority of users will not accept that.

IMO "the right to repair software" is essential and this duopoly is a function of explicit monopolistic practices.

Maybe LLMs can help open the "reverse engineering" Pandora's box - but we have yet to see that realised - at least for drivers / firmware


Replies

redox99 • today at 6:42 AM

I'd consider that solved with LLMs (the capability is already there and will only improve). The only remaining hurdle I'd say is hardware attestation.

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rimliu • today at 6:30 AM

so that's basically we don't know how to make the good hardware, let's force those who know give it to us.

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