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I was at my assembler and picked up a 30 layer PCB with two $5000 Xilinx FPGAs on it. Military application, really cool. They were t even special or rad hardene

I was at my assembler and picked up a 30 layer PCB with two $5000 Xilinx FPGAs on it. Military application, really cool. They were t even special or rad hardened for space. But “it’s FPGA and you can see the code”… ok, fucking lol though. HeartBleed OpenSSL was an issue for how many years and the code was open to a hundred million people who could read it in some language. I know FPGA developers they couldn’t even remotely follow a softcore CPU configuration. You are talking about less than 100,000 people in the world, and even that is probably way generous, maybe 30k?

simpaticoder 3y ago
You've obfuscated a good point. Open-source is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for openness. Actual human beings must also understand the source well enough to audit it and modify it. If heartbleed occurred in closed source, it would still be an active problem. The vendor would be reluctant to even admit the flaw, because it makes them look bad. And the whole world realized that one guy was maintaining OpenSSL, and he was on the edge of poverty. It was a wake-up call. Thousands of devs looked at the code, and understood it well enough to patch and fork. It's also true that, because of historical accidents, we have several more examples of https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/. However, that's not an argument against open source. It's an argument that we all should take ownership of what we ship, all the way down, without exception. An open CPU definition is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for this level of ownership.