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How hard is it to make firmware, CPU's and BiOS etc.

2 points by Clownshoesms ↗ HN
I am personally of the opinion we cannot trust corporations to look after our best interests as a species. They will look after a handful of people to excess, but abuse the rest of the population for profit.

That said, is there any path forward for open source/free:

* CPUs * Motherboard BIOS/CMOS * Firmware in proprietary devices

Thoughts? Am I the only one getting a bit peeved with wealthy corps trampling on the tragedy of the commons and us as a species?

4 comments

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ordu
> Am I the only one getting a bit peeved with wealthy corps trampling on the tragedy of the commons and us as a species?

You can find more of your kind. Take a loot at libreboot, for example.

p3trov94
I agree with you completely x
CyberFonic
You are not alone. The CoreBoot (https://www.coreboot.org/) project is maintained by programmers who would agree with you.

The main problem with opensource BIOS is the need to understand several proprietary interfaces.

As for the CPU, have a look at the RISC-V project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V). I have seen links to implementations but I can't find them at the moment.

You might want to consider systems built using ARM processors instead of Intel. There are several proprietary backdoors in Intel CPUs.

brudgers
It is very hard and very expensive to put a billion transistors on a chip.