4 ms·

Xbox, Nintendo's various consoles, and Sony's are all DRM'd to hell and back. If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something

Xbox, Nintendo's various consoles, and Sony's are all DRM'd to hell and back. If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users. For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s. The Playdate console seems a lot friendlier to developers and end users alike, but that's precisely because they're a smaller player in the market and need that advantage. Same dynamic played out with drivers for SCSI controllers, and GPUs under Linux, where the biggest players were the last to provide quality open source support. Seems to have a lot more to do with market position than with licenses, to me.

nicman23 2y ago
i mean that is ok but i do not want them using open source commons without any contribution. it is not a logic thing. i just hate oss being basically abused in that way
- timschmidt 2y ago
  I think it's a mistake to see it as abuse. They are using the software under the terms it was licensed to them by the developers. So no abuse has happened. Doubtless they have made contributions to that software in the process as well. Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And as consoles and PCs converge, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to be upset about one manufacturer's choices. I voted with my dollars and bought a Steam Deck. I think the preservation of culture is a much stronger argument for breaking console DRM and emulation.
  - nicman23 2y ago
    again you are correct i just do not like it :P
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      I get it. I am really excited about the current state of open source FPGA tooling, along with newly inexpensive and capable FPGAs as well as new low cost foundry shuttle services. Also the massive productivity boost LLMs provide. Feels like I have the world's most capable army of software development interns for $20/mo. Projects like MiSTer are very inspiring. Risc-V as well. Sam Zeloof's garage chip fab work too. And we even have reasonable platforms for developing open source phone stacks like Pinephone - I remember the bad old days of OpenMoko. I think proprietary chips and boards are about to go the way of proprietary *nix. It'll take a decade or more, and lots of work. But the future's never looked brighter for open systems.
      - nicman23 2y ago
        the issue i think is not the design but more the fabs. there are too many designs and not enough sub 10nm fabs
        timschmidt 2y ago
        There will always be a premium on latest node fabs. Nothing to be done about that without billions of dollars to invest, which comes with it's own strings. In time sub-10nm fabs will be older and less expensive as newer nodes come online. I don't need the fastest or lowest power devices though. I'd happily trade some of each for a more flexible future-proof machine. I just need an FPGA big enough to hold a linux-capable core or two, with graphics and audio and networking at an affordable price. Bonus points if it has some extra space for developing new peripherals. I think it'd be pretty easy to design something to conform to the raspberry pi compute module interface, for example, which would make it a drop-in replacement for lots of useful systems like laptops, NUCs, and other such stuff. Gotta love defacto standard interfaces.
lelanthran 2y ago
> If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users. That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software. Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license! If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software. > For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s. Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.
- timschmidt 2y ago
  > If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software. Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?
  - lelanthran 2y ago
    > It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide. I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      > That's a strawman Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of? Seems to imply force either through legal or practical means. > the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed. I benefit from both, as do you, as does the whole world. I bet proprietary software vendors get a real chuckle out of this sort of infighting.

nicman23 2y ago

i mean that is ok but i do not want them using open source commons without any contribution. it is not a logic thing. i just hate oss being basically abused in that way

timschmidt 2y ago
I think it's a mistake to see it as abuse. They are using the software under the terms it was licensed to them by the developers. So no abuse has happened. Doubtless they have made contributions to that software in the process as well. Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And as consoles and PCs converge, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to be upset about one manufacturer's choices. I voted with my dollars and bought a Steam Deck. I think the preservation of culture is a much stronger argument for breaking console DRM and emulation.
- nicman23 2y ago
  again you are correct i just do not like it :P
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    I get it. I am really excited about the current state of open source FPGA tooling, along with newly inexpensive and capable FPGAs as well as new low cost foundry shuttle services. Also the massive productivity boost LLMs provide. Feels like I have the world's most capable army of software development interns for $20/mo. Projects like MiSTer are very inspiring. Risc-V as well. Sam Zeloof's garage chip fab work too. And we even have reasonable platforms for developing open source phone stacks like Pinephone - I remember the bad old days of OpenMoko. I think proprietary chips and boards are about to go the way of proprietary *nix. It'll take a decade or more, and lots of work. But the future's never looked brighter for open systems.
    - nicman23 2y ago
      the issue i think is not the design but more the fabs. there are too many designs and not enough sub 10nm fabs
      - timschmidt 2y ago
        There will always be a premium on latest node fabs. Nothing to be done about that without billions of dollars to invest, which comes with it's own strings. In time sub-10nm fabs will be older and less expensive as newer nodes come online. I don't need the fastest or lowest power devices though. I'd happily trade some of each for a more flexible future-proof machine. I just need an FPGA big enough to hold a linux-capable core or two, with graphics and audio and networking at an affordable price. Bonus points if it has some extra space for developing new peripherals. I think it'd be pretty easy to design something to conform to the raspberry pi compute module interface, for example, which would make it a drop-in replacement for lots of useful systems like laptops, NUCs, and other such stuff. Gotta love defacto standard interfaces.

lelanthran 2y ago

> If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users. That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software. Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license! If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software. > For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s. Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.

timschmidt 2y ago
> If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software. Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide. I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    > That's a strawman Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of? Seems to imply force either through legal or practical means. > the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed. I benefit from both, as do you, as does the whole world. I bet proprietary software vendors get a real chuckle out of this sort of infighting.