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Hardware manufacturers can’t all go out of business. We need hardware at some point. Some might, but what I’m proposing would drive up costs for everyone. Most

Hardware manufacturers can’t all go out of business. We need hardware at some point. Some might, but what I’m proposing would drive up costs for everyone. Most likely, prices will just go up a little bit. Allowing hardware manufacturers to ship their own software, even if that software must be free, even if the hardware specs must be released, will still allow them to ship crappy hardware interfaces and compensate that with bloated software. I’m also afraid some manufacturer would try to game the system, with, say, tweaking the instruction set of every new GPU so third party drivers can’t really keep up.

gigatexal 3y ago
But if it’s open installing your own, open, on-bloatware software would be easy. That’s not the case now … but it could be. Hardware vendors then that install the vanilla, non-bloatware software will be seen as a feature. You can see this now: Google ships vanilla Android whereas some of the Android phone manufacturers ship it with their own crapware. Or on the other end of the spectrum Apple ships MacOS without advertising garbage but vanilla Windows ships games and ads in the start menu. So I don’t really see how your argument stands.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago
  Yeah, the part about gaming the system may not actually apply. Now, bloated software is still bloated software, even if it's open. I guess that with the sources the community can make it better, but there's still a limit to how well they can do: the hardware interface itself. It's a long tradition in hardware design to ship crappy interfaces and just say the software folks will make it nice. But if all you ship is the hardware, the interfaces have to be nice, else it will be harder to program for, and that definitely influences the ultimate success of the platform. See game consoles, I believe those who have a reputation of being hard to program tend to sell less (because they have fewer or worse games).

gigatexal 3y ago

But if it’s open installing your own, open, on-bloatware software would be easy. That’s not the case now … but it could be. Hardware vendors then that install the vanilla, non-bloatware software will be seen as a feature. You can see this now: Google ships vanilla Android whereas some of the Android phone manufacturers ship it with their own crapware. Or on the other end of the spectrum Apple ships MacOS without advertising garbage but vanilla Windows ships games and ads in the start menu. So I don’t really see how your argument stands.

loup-vaillant 3y ago
Yeah, the part about gaming the system may not actually apply. Now, bloated software is still bloated software, even if it's open. I guess that with the sources the community can make it better, but there's still a limit to how well they can do: the hardware interface itself. It's a long tradition in hardware design to ship crappy interfaces and just say the software folks will make it nice. But if all you ship is the hardware, the interfaces have to be nice, else it will be harder to program for, and that definitely influences the ultimate success of the platform. See game consoles, I believe those who have a reputation of being hard to program tend to sell less (because they have fewer or worse games).