Methinks the commenters here are having too much fun contending the amd&arm claim because it's in the headline and it's fun to call articles stupid. But that de

Methinks the commenters here are having too much fun contending the amd&arm claim because it's in the headline and it's fun to call articles stupid. But that detail is only incidental to the message of the statement. And at this moment, I don't see anyone discussing the meat of this resignation letter. > So, today, we're building disposable systems, without any consideration to future products, because when the time will come, we'll pick the next trendy SoC. No need to have what makes an architecture: a vision towards the future allowing different hardware generations to share hardware and software; a design allowing today's software to be able to run on tomorrow's hardware as long as the changes are not too drastic; consistency in choices of busses, key chips, address maps; a real firmware, not something utterly disgusting as EFI which can't even compete with > 20 years old Open Firmware (IEEE 1275); and reliably enumerable busses. No, sir, we'll take today's latest SoC, wire a few extra devices wherever we can find some hole in the address map, put a castrated u-boot on it, and today's stable Linux tree, and here you go, here's your ``platform''. And people cheer. This issue at hand is that a minority of oss developers sometimes fight very hard to keep a long-term architectural vision maintained. But, an overwhelming majority just swoops in and does the minimal work necessary to get what they need running today with little consideration for tomorrow. Eventually the long-term minority gets frustrated by being eternally overwhelmed and resigns. This is such a case. So, questions seem to be: Is this really inevitable or can something realistically be done to improve the situation? Is it going to bite us in the ass or is it actually "better" in a worse-is-better kind of way?