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A comment on RISC-V based single board computers are getting there. Parent comment

Re:RISC-V based single board computers are getting there by matheusmoreira on Monday August 01, 2022 @06:03AM (#32303899)
Plan B is also vital for computer freedom. In an ideal world, we would be able to make good enough chips at home, just like we can make software at home. Chip fabrication currently costs billions of dollars, they are therefore centralized operations vulnerable to regulation. Ability to make computers at home would preempt any attempt to regulate encryption, for example.
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Re:RISC-V based single board computers are getting there by automatic6131 on Monday August 01, 2022 @06:28AM (#32304068)
Nice! And in this ideal world, we could also make steel tools in our decentralised garden furnaces. The steel industry costs the world billions of dollar currently, imagine if we could all make our own iron tools without paying for patents e.g. torx head screw drivers from our back yard! :^)
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Re:RISC-V based single board computers are getting there by matheusmoreira on Monday August 01, 2022 @07:17AM (#32304411)
That is totally possible though. Plenty of people know metal working and can make tools such as knives. It's not as efficient as industrial mass production but it's possible.
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Re:RISC-V based single board computers are getting there by numpad0 on Monday August 01, 2022 @07:37AM (#32304587)
I think the tongue in the cheek comes from a historical context that exactly this was attempted in the Great Leap Forward movement, as part of the Great Cultural Revolution movement in Communist China, which was, as with anything Communist, a huge leap and huge progress backwards.
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Re:RISC-V based single board computers are getting there by matheusmoreira on Monday August 01, 2022 @10:41AM (#32306633)
I'm not educated about chinese history but I will read about it. I'd like to clarify that I don't mean anything radical like replacing fabs with home production. Free software never replaced software companies, they coexist.

I just wish it was possible so that we always have the means to produce 100% freedom-respecting general purpose computer hardware that's viable for daily use. That way we're not forced to accept the status quo when corporations start bundling suspicious stuff like IME into their processors.

We already have the means to produce freedom respecting software ourselves but that gets us nowhere if the chip makers start requiring cryptographic signatures before executing software. What good is free software if we can't run it?

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