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I think the Volkswagen episode shows that we need better emission testing mechanisms. Demanding that all code be open-source unfairly targets the software indu

by credo 11y ago

I think the Volkswagen episode shows that we need better emission testing mechanisms. Demanding that all code be open-source unfairly targets the software industry (companies that sell software products for money). Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public ? If all software code must be publicly available, why not demand that Coca Cola also make their formula and their entire manufacturing process public ? Why not insist that no product must have any proprietary/secret information about how the product was created ? Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. I think we need a better emission testing system for testing emissions, not a government review of software code. IMO asking for free software code is an ideological demand that is better promoted through the free market. Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components, but all of us should only ask that the government fix its emission testing process.

lemming 11y ago
Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? That's a great question - why not? For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, and by meddling with search results (which they already do to try to personalise my results) they could make or break companies or politicians by presenting one-sided or even false material. That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it?
- sloanesturz 11y ago
  Maybe because thousands of people have spent millions of hours making the best search engine in the world and they should be rewarded for their work by making money off of it instead of giving it away for free?
  - damoe 11y ago
    They have been rewarded for their work. Perhaps there should be limits on these rewards?
    - ra1n85 11y ago
      As determined by who?
      - SapphireSun 11y ago
        Well clearly if the rewards included all the money on the planet, that would be egregious. It seems fairly likely that there would be limits that are lower than that (all the money in a country) and possibly below that....
    - verinus 11y ago
      this is a seriuous problem with all digital products and comes down to fixed vs. variable costs: - development costs are fixed costs- they are independet of the number of products sold. - production costs are variable costs- they have to be paid for every unit sold. as digital copies in most cases have no or negligible variable costs (support may be regarded as variable) the earnings for certain products can be way out of any sensible relation- but who should say: enough is enough? als long as there is no sensible answer to this question there can only be one: let the market decide...
      - TuringTest 11y ago
        > let the market decide... Are you talking about a market with or without a regulated strong copyright law?
    - vfdfv 11y ago
      This is a great question. What would the world look like if no individual could earn more than a million dollars a year, or if companies were taxed at exceedingly high rates once they reached a valuation of 100 millions dollars? I realize it would be tricky to implement, but considering the societal benefit of more even wealth distribution the idea itself is worth exploring.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Linux is also made of millions of man-hours of work and yet it is free and Free and it has become a great gift to Humanity as a whole.
  - zurn 11y ago
    Publishing source code doesn't preclude making money off it. There are many natural experiments in this category, where source code of proprietary products was leaked with little ill effects. It's happened eg to Windows, many games, VMware... This pretty closely models the scenario of making source code public but not giving anyone license to use it for purposes other than study.
  - Tinyyy 11y ago
    I think patents exists for this very reason.
    - davexunit 11y ago
      But software patents are clearly a scam, too.
- abecedarius 11y ago
  Bruce Schneier made a similar proposal in Data and Goliath, his latest book. I forget exactly how similar, and of course the details matter; but the purpose behind it was much as you say.
- danso 11y ago
  Why do you need to see Google's source code when you already know that Google is personalizing the search results for you? Hypothetically, what kind of parameters discernible in Google's search code would make the difference between "OK meddling" versus "Evil meddling"? The bigger question is: why do you think that there is some kind of pure, objective ranking of websites that Google is now tampering with? Do you think that someone whose IP is located in Utah should get the same result for "good hamburgers late night" as someone in New York? If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things that we don't need a review of source code to debate. But your suspicions toward them seems to be based off of a worldview in which there is One True Web for everyone, which seems as problematic as the mindset that surely Google can do no evil. Given that Google uses personal data to shape the web its users see...isn't it even more relevant to see the data they collect? AFAIK, Google still allows us to download virtually every bit of data we've explicitly generated on its services, including all the emails and search requests we've conducted.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things I don't find this one so complicated; they're better sent to en.wikipedia.org, because that page, like their query, is written in english.
    - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
      Additionally, it could depend on whether they are using google.com or google.vn.
    - danso 11y ago
      Sorry if this is already evident to you...but the differences between Wikipedia sites is not just about the language. vi.wikipedia.org is independently edited and maintained from en.wikipedia.org. The Vietnamese wikipedia page [1] is not as lengthy as the English one. And I'm not as good as reading Vietnamese as I should be, but the Vietnamese page doesn't seem to have the same content for "Media and censorship" that the English one does...among other differences. So I don't think it's as simple as "Send them to whatever language they used" (though I guess this is one case where seeing Google's source code would be enlightening, so...touché?) [1] https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam
- easytiger 11y ago
  > For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, That's their problem.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it? That's a double-edged sword here. The current problem with search, and one of the reasons the exact algorithms stay undisclosed, is not Google. It's your average Joe the small business owner, who sees no problem with poisoning the Internet with spam and fake websites, just to gain a competitive edge. There's even a whole industry (SEO/SEM) serving such Joes, that specializes in extreme "meddling with search results". As long as Google maintains some control over it, it can tweak and twist their algorithms to counteract the manipulation, or even explicitly penalize biggest offenders. Take that control away and the Internet will go to shit. Search is a common resource, and it needs to be managed. I'm far more willing to trust Google than a mob of hundreds of millions "entrepreneurs" trying to one-up one another at the cost of everyone else.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    This sounds similar to security through obscurity.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Yes, but you don't have much other choice. Security through obscurity can and often is practical, and in this case a full, open solution is an AI-complete problem (i.e. equivalent to creating a superhuman artificial intelligence), because it would need to understand motivations behind actions, and not just actions themselves.
- zanny 11y ago
  It is a valid proposal. Google is not just selling you a search algorithm with their google.com platform, but also the server infrastructure that maintains it, the brand name (a vast swathe of less tech savvy Internet users say google X instead of go to X website), and the uptime. Yes, the algorithm constitutes a portion of their value add, but if they open sourced google.com on its own they would not see their business destroyed for it. Would Bing suddenly become a lot better? Certainly. Would people start using Bing over Google if it just became as good as Google search? Certainly not. The only candidates that might take market share are DuckDuckGo and StartPage, who preach privacy and thus a lot of users (including myself) prefer them despite their poorer search results. If they could get Googles algorithms, they would produce better results and probably steal market share. How much market share? 1%? Do privacy savvy searchers even constitute 1% of search traffic now? Yes, it is absolutely a bad business decision for them to publish their source. They are much more likely to lose money than to see third party contributions to their code make their search so much better they offset the cost of everyone having access to the same quality search. But I still postulate it would not be much revenue and market share, and that there are tremendous applications for extremely sophisticated search algorithms like Googles that could produce tremendous economic prosperity for other disciplines, and I imagine their work might be applied in completely unrelated industries for other search domain problems. Their algorithm is ultra-specific to web page indexing, but I'm sure in that Goliath beast of code there is some novel ingenuity that we are missing due to its closed nature.
hueving 11y ago
>Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components This doesn't work when you are a small minority of the market. It just means you can't have anything. The economies of scale required to produce processors, etc do not enable niche markets to thrive.
ekianjo 11y ago
> IMO asking for free software code is an ideological demand that is better promoted through the free market. Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components, but all of us should only ask that the government fix its emission testing process. The problem is that the amount of devices out there with non-proprietary components is close to nil. So there's a clear lack of choice, it's almost impossible to get a computer without non-free blob inside as well. The balance is clearly skewed towards proprietary-everything.
- zanny 11y ago
  I'm probably one of the few willing to buy a SPARC computer that is completely free, even at the likely 500% markup or more required to build it. But I also imagine it would be impossible to build due to how few of us even care. You would need chips, which are pretty much not being manufactured anymore. Good luck buying fab time as TSMC, and having enough volume to justify it. You also need a design, thankfully the SPARC chips have open designs, but they are still really old for old fab tech. Good luck getting the engineers to update it. You need mainboards, assembled somewhere (expensive) and fabbed (again, expensive). You could invent your own or reuse a published ancient print if any exist. You would need open designed DRAM, and good luck trying to support modern iterations like ddr3 or 4 on old SPARC boards. I'm not aware of any DRAM being sold with open blueprints, but also have not looked much into it. You would need open storage devices. No SSD or HDD qualifies today, since they all have proprietary microcode controllers. No open designs or firmware to be found there. You would need a graphics accelerator. While there are some purely free software GPU drivers (Broadcom for the Raspi) none of the designs are open. Again, good luck. All combined the cost of just getting these five core components in a firmware free / open design state is insane. It would be on the order of tens or hundreds or probably a billion or more USD just to get a few thousand units. And at those kinds of costs (lets say we are optimistic and sell 10,000 fully open computers) and say it cost only 100M to build them, they would be $10,000 each for what is probably as powerful as something proprietary you could pick up today for $50-100. One day I'm absolutely certain there will be a sustainable market for such a computer, because with proprietary hardware and software you are guaranteed to eventually be screwed over. Its only a matter of how deep in the rabbit hole you want to get before you wake up and realize how bad an idea it is. Eventually, I am certain all hardware and software design will be open, its just a matter of how long we want to slow progress and risk our individual prosperity on proprietary tools until enough wake up to the problem.
darkmighty 11y ago
Are we really talking about open sourcing here? As far as I know the discussion is against DMCA, which prevents even looking at the code on the car. DMCA makes no sense whatsoever. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/researchers-could-have-uncovered-volkswagens-emissions-cheat-if-not-hindered-dmca https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/researchers-could-have...
- something123 11y ago
  Devil's advocate: It makes the law is trying to avoid their being a distinction between code that lives on hardware you have in your possession and code that lives on a company server. For instance you might be indignant that you can't look at the code on your proprietary device, but you aren't indignant that you can't look at the code that runs Google's search engine. So without laws to "equal the playing field" in a sense - server side service companies get a distinct advantage as they're able to have trade secrets - while companies that distribute code are kinda screwed. Even with the current legal environment companies STILL try to push processing into their own server controlled space (see Siri, Cortana, most cloud services)
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    Honestly, I believe if you're given a physical device in your hands and pay for it, you should have the right to figure out how it works. The problem of everyone uploading code to the cloud to prevent this (which is not applicable to cars firmware anyway) is different, and a valid way to protect your IP. I don't particularly care this makes code move into the cloud. But the packets sent to your device, which may affect your device, your health, well-being directly, you should be able to read and modify -- same as the local code. By forcing black boxes upon us we don't have a minimal control, understanding, or prediction of what our own devices can do to ourselves. It's insane.
    - something123 11y ago
      So you have zero sympathy for the fact that this creates an unequal playing field? That Google gets too keep all their code private but a car company can't (due to the rather arbitrary fact that it's impractical for the car to ask a server how to change the engine parameters) How about if I want to buy a device and agree to not see the code? (b/c for instance - I personally - have no interest in it) Should I not be allowed to enter such a contract with a company? If yes, why is a company not allowed to sell devices exclusively with such licenses? If not, why are you limiting the consumer's rights? (this rabbit hole simply leads to companies only leasing consumer's devices, b/c selling them suddenly involves giving away all your trade secrets)
belorn 11y ago
> Demanding that all code be open-source Open source means a license which grants others permission to modify and share the code in a non-discriminative way. This is not that. > asking for free software code... Free software also add patent grants and the right to run the software for any purpose. While anti-DRM has been called for in other articles, code inspection doesn't need to be done by volunteer researchers and can simply be done by government inspections. This leads me to... > why not demand that Coca Cola also make their formula and their entire manufacturing process public I am sure Coca Cola allow health inspections into their manufacturing process. They are also required by law to provide an ingredient list in order to be sold for human consumption, including a nutrient list which further details what Coca Cola is made from. If they had sneaked in some illegal substances, say rat poison, we would be here asking why current regulations were not enough. > we need a better emission testing system We can always claim that the testing systems need to be better, but it is not enough to just do black box testing when the product itself can identify and change behavior during testing. If society keeps the current system, we would need to at least add criminal liability for deceiving during testing.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  >> I am sure Coca Cola allow health inspections into their manufacturing process. They are also required by law to provide an ingredient list in order to be sold for human consumption Check your coke can. Look for the word "flavor". That's not an ingredient. That's their secret recipe stuff. They don't have to disclose it on the label. They can make a "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) determination in-house and exempt themselves from disclosure of a trade secret. These are often submitted to the FDA for approval, but not always. If the substance can be determined as gras based on publicly-available information they need not submit to the FDA. It's all about allowing companies to keep their trade secrets ... which is very much similar to the situation with vehicle electronics.
  - belorn 11y ago
    If a car manufacturer want to add flavor to their software which follows the very strict regulations of GRAS, then why not? If someone want to add different lights on their hubcaps, or maybe a voice controlled assistant inside the car, then they are free to follow all the regulative hoops in order for that isolated unit of additive to be declared as safe. The legal fallout if Coca Cola claimed rat poison as GRAS would be nothing less of major incident. The expert panel that they are required to hire would likely go to jail on fraud. The documents to the FDA would be proof of intentional deceit, basically guaranteeing that who ever submitted it will get the harshest punishment available to the court. All of it would be enough of a deterrent that companies only do this for the most critical company secrets which they are 100% sure is safe, and everything else can be inspected by the FDA. A pragmatical and reasonable method to make life critical products as safe as possible.
agumonkey 11y ago
Society should have better testing infrastructure all around. Cars, food, pills, materials, clothes. IMVHO states (govt) should be mostly that: fast and lean test suites.
SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
> Demanding that all code be open-source That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the requirement for 3rd party review, and it seems to be a common oversimplification here on HN. There is some precedent for auditing important code without any intention of open-sourcing it: http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-opens-transparency-center-in-brussels-for-looking-at-source-code-2015-6 http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-opens-transparency-c... http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-china-security-audits-nsa-2015-1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-china-security-audits-ns...
tim333 11y ago
>Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? You could ask for the code to be open in applications where it can directly kill the public, eg. car and aircraft controls, and not elsewhere.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
>I think the Volkswagen episode shows that we need better emission testing mechanisms. Code is not the problem - in this case code is just one possible loophole out of many possible loopholes. The fix here is to make sure that corporate officers who break the law and cause significant harm are jailed and/or stripped of any profits they accumulate as a result of their actions. This will not happen because we've set up a culture where the higher up the pyramid you are, the more you gain personally and the less you need to worry about being punished for being a bad actor. Convictions do happen occasionally, but they're exceptional, not inevitable. You're not going to fix that political/economic problem - which is a direct outcome of free market ideology - with code review.
pmlnr 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-source_vs._source-available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-sour... You can make it source available only. Although China would probably just use it as it was free, I give you that, but they use it anyway.
surge 11y ago
You can have a trusted third party, either a government entity or certified vendor inspect the code under NDA and verify there is now fowl play or egregious or sloppy practices. It would be no worse than letting contractors look at your code.
redblacktree 11y ago
> Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components Which minivan can I buy that runs on free software?

by credo 11y ago

lemming 11y ago

Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? That's a great question - why not? For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, and by meddling with search results (which they already do to try to personalise my results) they could make or break companies or politicians by presenting one-sided or even false material. That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it?

sloanesturz 11y ago
Maybe because thousands of people have spent millions of hours making the best search engine in the world and they should be rewarded for their work by making money off of it instead of giving it away for free?
- damoe 11y ago
  They have been rewarded for their work. Perhaps there should be limits on these rewards?
  - ra1n85 11y ago
    As determined by who?
    - SapphireSun 11y ago
      Well clearly if the rewards included all the money on the planet, that would be egregious. It seems fairly likely that there would be limits that are lower than that (all the money in a country) and possibly below that....
  - verinus 11y ago
    this is a seriuous problem with all digital products and comes down to fixed vs. variable costs: - development costs are fixed costs- they are independet of the number of products sold. - production costs are variable costs- they have to be paid for every unit sold. as digital copies in most cases have no or negligible variable costs (support may be regarded as variable) the earnings for certain products can be way out of any sensible relation- but who should say: enough is enough? als long as there is no sensible answer to this question there can only be one: let the market decide...
    - TuringTest 11y ago
      > let the market decide... Are you talking about a market with or without a regulated strong copyright law?
  - vfdfv 11y ago
    This is a great question. What would the world look like if no individual could earn more than a million dollars a year, or if companies were taxed at exceedingly high rates once they reached a valuation of 100 millions dollars? I realize it would be tricky to implement, but considering the societal benefit of more even wealth distribution the idea itself is worth exploring.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Linux is also made of millions of man-hours of work and yet it is free and Free and it has become a great gift to Humanity as a whole.
- zurn 11y ago
  Publishing source code doesn't preclude making money off it. There are many natural experiments in this category, where source code of proprietary products was leaked with little ill effects. It's happened eg to Windows, many games, VMware... This pretty closely models the scenario of making source code public but not giving anyone license to use it for purposes other than study.
- Tinyyy 11y ago
  I think patents exists for this very reason.
  - davexunit 11y ago
    But software patents are clearly a scam, too.
abecedarius 11y ago
Bruce Schneier made a similar proposal in Data and Goliath, his latest book. I forget exactly how similar, and of course the details matter; but the purpose behind it was much as you say.
danso 11y ago
Why do you need to see Google's source code when you already know that Google is personalizing the search results for you? Hypothetically, what kind of parameters discernible in Google's search code would make the difference between "OK meddling" versus "Evil meddling"? The bigger question is: why do you think that there is some kind of pure, objective ranking of websites that Google is now tampering with? Do you think that someone whose IP is located in Utah should get the same result for "good hamburgers late night" as someone in New York? If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things that we don't need a review of source code to debate. But your suspicions toward them seems to be based off of a worldview in which there is One True Web for everyone, which seems as problematic as the mindset that surely Google can do no evil. Given that Google uses personal data to shape the web its users see...isn't it even more relevant to see the data they collect? AFAIK, Google still allows us to download virtually every bit of data we've explicitly generated on its services, including all the emails and search requests we've conducted.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things I don't find this one so complicated; they're better sent to en.wikipedia.org, because that page, like their query, is written in english.
  - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
    Additionally, it could depend on whether they are using google.com or google.vn.
  - danso 11y ago
    Sorry if this is already evident to you...but the differences between Wikipedia sites is not just about the language. vi.wikipedia.org is independently edited and maintained from en.wikipedia.org. The Vietnamese wikipedia page [1] is not as lengthy as the English one. And I'm not as good as reading Vietnamese as I should be, but the Vietnamese page doesn't seem to have the same content for "Media and censorship" that the English one does...among other differences. So I don't think it's as simple as "Send them to whatever language they used" (though I guess this is one case where seeing Google's source code would be enlightening, so...touché?) [1] https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam
easytiger 11y ago
> For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, That's their problem.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it? That's a double-edged sword here. The current problem with search, and one of the reasons the exact algorithms stay undisclosed, is not Google. It's your average Joe the small business owner, who sees no problem with poisoning the Internet with spam and fake websites, just to gain a competitive edge. There's even a whole industry (SEO/SEM) serving such Joes, that specializes in extreme "meddling with search results". As long as Google maintains some control over it, it can tweak and twist their algorithms to counteract the manipulation, or even explicitly penalize biggest offenders. Take that control away and the Internet will go to shit. Search is a common resource, and it needs to be managed. I'm far more willing to trust Google than a mob of hundreds of millions "entrepreneurs" trying to one-up one another at the cost of everyone else.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  This sounds similar to security through obscurity.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yes, but you don't have much other choice. Security through obscurity can and often is practical, and in this case a full, open solution is an AI-complete problem (i.e. equivalent to creating a superhuman artificial intelligence), because it would need to understand motivations behind actions, and not just actions themselves.
zanny 11y ago
It is a valid proposal. Google is not just selling you a search algorithm with their google.com platform, but also the server infrastructure that maintains it, the brand name (a vast swathe of less tech savvy Internet users say google X instead of go to X website), and the uptime. Yes, the algorithm constitutes a portion of their value add, but if they open sourced google.com on its own they would not see their business destroyed for it. Would Bing suddenly become a lot better? Certainly. Would people start using Bing over Google if it just became as good as Google search? Certainly not. The only candidates that might take market share are DuckDuckGo and StartPage, who preach privacy and thus a lot of users (including myself) prefer them despite their poorer search results. If they could get Googles algorithms, they would produce better results and probably steal market share. How much market share? 1%? Do privacy savvy searchers even constitute 1% of search traffic now? Yes, it is absolutely a bad business decision for them to publish their source. They are much more likely to lose money than to see third party contributions to their code make their search so much better they offset the cost of everyone having access to the same quality search. But I still postulate it would not be much revenue and market share, and that there are tremendous applications for extremely sophisticated search algorithms like Googles that could produce tremendous economic prosperity for other disciplines, and I imagine their work might be applied in completely unrelated industries for other search domain problems. Their algorithm is ultra-specific to web page indexing, but I'm sure in that Goliath beast of code there is some novel ingenuity that we are missing due to its closed nature.

hueving 11y ago

>Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components This doesn't work when you are a small minority of the market. It just means you can't have anything. The economies of scale required to produce processors, etc do not enable niche markets to thrive.

ekianjo 11y ago

> IMO asking for free software code is an ideological demand that is better promoted through the free market. Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components, but all of us should only ask that the government fix its emission testing process. The problem is that the amount of devices out there with non-proprietary components is close to nil. So there's a clear lack of choice, it's almost impossible to get a computer without non-free blob inside as well. The balance is clearly skewed towards proprietary-everything.

zanny 11y ago
I'm probably one of the few willing to buy a SPARC computer that is completely free, even at the likely 500% markup or more required to build it. But I also imagine it would be impossible to build due to how few of us even care. You would need chips, which are pretty much not being manufactured anymore. Good luck buying fab time as TSMC, and having enough volume to justify it. You also need a design, thankfully the SPARC chips have open designs, but they are still really old for old fab tech. Good luck getting the engineers to update it. You need mainboards, assembled somewhere (expensive) and fabbed (again, expensive). You could invent your own or reuse a published ancient print if any exist. You would need open designed DRAM, and good luck trying to support modern iterations like ddr3 or 4 on old SPARC boards. I'm not aware of any DRAM being sold with open blueprints, but also have not looked much into it. You would need open storage devices. No SSD or HDD qualifies today, since they all have proprietary microcode controllers. No open designs or firmware to be found there. You would need a graphics accelerator. While there are some purely free software GPU drivers (Broadcom for the Raspi) none of the designs are open. Again, good luck. All combined the cost of just getting these five core components in a firmware free / open design state is insane. It would be on the order of tens or hundreds or probably a billion or more USD just to get a few thousand units. And at those kinds of costs (lets say we are optimistic and sell 10,000 fully open computers) and say it cost only 100M to build them, they would be $10,000 each for what is probably as powerful as something proprietary you could pick up today for $50-100. One day I'm absolutely certain there will be a sustainable market for such a computer, because with proprietary hardware and software you are guaranteed to eventually be screwed over. Its only a matter of how deep in the rabbit hole you want to get before you wake up and realize how bad an idea it is. Eventually, I am certain all hardware and software design will be open, its just a matter of how long we want to slow progress and risk our individual prosperity on proprietary tools until enough wake up to the problem.

darkmighty 11y ago

Are we really talking about open sourcing here? As far as I know the discussion is against DMCA, which prevents even looking at the code on the car. DMCA makes no sense whatsoever. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/researchers-could-have-uncovered-volkswagens-emissions-cheat-if-not-hindered-dmca https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/researchers-could-have...

something123 11y ago
Devil's advocate: It makes the law is trying to avoid their being a distinction between code that lives on hardware you have in your possession and code that lives on a company server. For instance you might be indignant that you can't look at the code on your proprietary device, but you aren't indignant that you can't look at the code that runs Google's search engine. So without laws to "equal the playing field" in a sense - server side service companies get a distinct advantage as they're able to have trade secrets - while companies that distribute code are kinda screwed. Even with the current legal environment companies STILL try to push processing into their own server controlled space (see Siri, Cortana, most cloud services)
- darkmighty 11y ago
  Honestly, I believe if you're given a physical device in your hands and pay for it, you should have the right to figure out how it works. The problem of everyone uploading code to the cloud to prevent this (which is not applicable to cars firmware anyway) is different, and a valid way to protect your IP. I don't particularly care this makes code move into the cloud. But the packets sent to your device, which may affect your device, your health, well-being directly, you should be able to read and modify -- same as the local code. By forcing black boxes upon us we don't have a minimal control, understanding, or prediction of what our own devices can do to ourselves. It's insane.
  - something123 11y ago
    So you have zero sympathy for the fact that this creates an unequal playing field? That Google gets too keep all their code private but a car company can't (due to the rather arbitrary fact that it's impractical for the car to ask a server how to change the engine parameters) How about if I want to buy a device and agree to not see the code? (b/c for instance - I personally - have no interest in it) Should I not be allowed to enter such a contract with a company? If yes, why is a company not allowed to sell devices exclusively with such licenses? If not, why are you limiting the consumer's rights? (this rabbit hole simply leads to companies only leasing consumer's devices, b/c selling them suddenly involves giving away all your trade secrets)

belorn 11y ago

> Demanding that all code be open-source Open source means a license which grants others permission to modify and share the code in a non-discriminative way. This is not that. > asking for free software code... Free software also add patent grants and the right to run the software for any purpose. While anti-DRM has been called for in other articles, code inspection doesn't need to be done by volunteer researchers and can simply be done by government inspections. This leads me to... > why not demand that Coca Cola also make their formula and their entire manufacturing process public I am sure Coca Cola allow health inspections into their manufacturing process. They are also required by law to provide an ingredient list in order to be sold for human consumption, including a nutrient list which further details what Coca Cola is made from. If they had sneaked in some illegal substances, say rat poison, we would be here asking why current regulations were not enough. > we need a better emission testing system We can always claim that the testing systems need to be better, but it is not enough to just do black box testing when the product itself can identify and change behavior during testing. If society keeps the current system, we would need to at least add criminal liability for deceiving during testing.

sandworm101 11y ago
>> I am sure Coca Cola allow health inspections into their manufacturing process. They are also required by law to provide an ingredient list in order to be sold for human consumption Check your coke can. Look for the word "flavor". That's not an ingredient. That's their secret recipe stuff. They don't have to disclose it on the label. They can make a "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) determination in-house and exempt themselves from disclosure of a trade secret. These are often submitted to the FDA for approval, but not always. If the substance can be determined as gras based on publicly-available information they need not submit to the FDA. It's all about allowing companies to keep their trade secrets ... which is very much similar to the situation with vehicle electronics.
- belorn 11y ago
  If a car manufacturer want to add flavor to their software which follows the very strict regulations of GRAS, then why not? If someone want to add different lights on their hubcaps, or maybe a voice controlled assistant inside the car, then they are free to follow all the regulative hoops in order for that isolated unit of additive to be declared as safe. The legal fallout if Coca Cola claimed rat poison as GRAS would be nothing less of major incident. The expert panel that they are required to hire would likely go to jail on fraud. The documents to the FDA would be proof of intentional deceit, basically guaranteeing that who ever submitted it will get the harshest punishment available to the court. All of it would be enough of a deterrent that companies only do this for the most critical company secrets which they are 100% sure is safe, and everything else can be inspected by the FDA. A pragmatical and reasonable method to make life critical products as safe as possible.

agumonkey 11y ago

Society should have better testing infrastructure all around. Cars, food, pills, materials, clothes. IMVHO states (govt) should be mostly that: fast and lean test suites.

SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago

> Demanding that all code be open-source That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the requirement for 3rd party review, and it seems to be a common oversimplification here on HN. There is some precedent for auditing important code without any intention of open-sourcing it: http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-opens-transparency-center-in-brussels-for-looking-at-source-code-2015-6 http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-opens-transparency-c... http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-china-security-audits-nsa-2015-1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-china-security-audits-ns...

tim333 11y ago

>Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? You could ask for the code to be open in applications where it can directly kill the public, eg. car and aircraft controls, and not elsewhere.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

>I think the Volkswagen episode shows that we need better emission testing mechanisms. Code is not the problem - in this case code is just one possible loophole out of many possible loopholes. The fix here is to make sure that corporate officers who break the law and cause significant harm are jailed and/or stripped of any profits they accumulate as a result of their actions. This will not happen because we've set up a culture where the higher up the pyramid you are, the more you gain personally and the less you need to worry about being punished for being a bad actor. Convictions do happen occasionally, but they're exceptional, not inevitable. You're not going to fix that political/economic problem - which is a direct outcome of free market ideology - with code review.

pmlnr 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-source_vs._source-available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-sour... You can make it source available only. Although China would probably just use it as it was free, I give you that, but they use it anyway.

surge 11y ago

You can have a trusted third party, either a government entity or certified vendor inspect the code under NDA and verify there is now fowl play or egregious or sloppy practices. It would be no worse than letting contractors look at your code.

redblacktree 11y ago

> Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components Which minivan can I buy that runs on free software?