7 ms·
We've come a long way when Google are peddling non-free software run on freedom hardware.
by throwaway167 3y ago
We've come a long way when Google are peddling non-free software run on freedom hardware.
- tripdout 3y agoFreedom hardware?
- preciousoo 3y agoAssuming US-market-first hardware (As opposed to EU or China). This is my first time seeing such a term too
- tommiegannert 3y agoMore likely, it allures to RISC-V being a royalty-free open standard, unlike ARM. As teraflop said, though, in practice this doesn't mean much. Chip designers will throw in proprietary IP just for patentability and differentiation.
- teraflop 3y agoCommercially available RISC-V hardware is not more "free" than other types of CPUs, in any meaningful way. The openness of the RISC-V specification is great for chip designers, manufacturers, and researchers. But it has basically no effect on end users, except indirectly (i.e. hopefully the chips are cheaper, because there's more competition and no license fees).
- leereeves 3y agoYou could also say that open source has basically no (direct) effect on end users, because the majority of end users are not coders, and even those that are rarely look at the code of the apps they use. The indirect effects are the point.
- jowea 3y agoThe indirect effect of open source software are really strong though. It only takes one coder to remove an anti-feature that the devs decided to include and publish.
- saagarjha 3y agoThe indirect effects of proprietary extensions, which means your software isn't portable anymore?
- stefan_ 3y agoWhat are the indirect effects? You realize the least troubling part of making Android run on some proprietary hardware was the ARM processor? That part is perfectly fine! It's the graphics card, the display hardware, the camera, the video encoding/decoding - these are all proprietary, undocumented blobs of IP with no upstream support. Your RISCV Android phone is still going to have all of those, it makes exactly zero difference.
- rockemsockem 3y agoWouldn't the main indirect effect be that it's easier for new companies to enter the smartphone space due to reduced costs from the ISA being open? I'd expect that to take a while, but wouldn't that be the main benefit?
- acdha 3y agoThe cost of developing a competitive CPU is high, and then you have to package the whole thing into a SoC and optimize for power usage, support it for years, etc. The ISA is not the limiting factor there.
- snvzz 3y ago>The cost of developing a competitive CPU is high It can be dodged by either licensing some of the hundreds of commercial core designs available, or by using one of the (several) available open source RISC-V implementations. Other competitive ISAs also have a few -albeit not anywhere as many- open source implementations, but there's no dodging the ISA royalty fee on these.
- rapnie 3y agoNot into open hardware, but recently bumped into this FPGA-based approach - the MNT RKX7 Open Hardware FPGA CPU Module [0] - that is a good example of how to experiment with a RISC-V design before spending the money to produce the actual chip. [0] https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-09-29-rkx7-showcase.html https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-09-29-rkx7-showcase.h...
- kllrnohj 3y agoRISC-V isn't freedom hardware, there's no equivalent to copyleft.
- ongy 3y agoThe blog post is by the open source office in Google, not specifically the android team And so far entirely about AOSP and getting that running. GApps (the non-free part) isn't mentioned at all. And like someone else said, there's use cases besides phones that use android. And some people Run de-googled android on phones, it's just degraded :/ - googler, but far from anything android
- goodpoint 3y agoThey are peddling closed software that spies on you on closed hardware.