@satchmoz thanks for the link. Yeah, I am skipping that. Got not interest in a "hackable" product so closed out of the box.

I am sure you feel the same way, I want to put my money where my mouth is... but where do I put my money?!

@maiki A lot of this has been an uphill battle with the embedded market; that has only recently started to see some change.

Honestly keep one eye on crowdsupply. There is going to be interesting stuff in the next year or two.

We saw the first RISC-V chip on crowdsupply in an arduino form factor this year.

EOMA68 is going to come around for multiple turns at the bat.

Im thinking we are only a year or two away from completely free Risc-V SoC based products.

@maiki one thing that is obvious to me is that it is the state of SoCs which is terrible for freedom right now.

Lots of project like the various single board computers and the PocketChip would use more open SoCs in a hearbeat if they existed.

Getting SoC manufacturers to understand there is a market for that is really the first step.

@satchmoz so you are saying I *should* buy a #PocketCHIP. ^_^

What are your top watched projects? I want to start tracking them, too.

@maiki Not to keep waxing on about it but the EOMA68 project is definitely worth following. They are primarily working on a laptop and a microdesktop right now, but they have other form factors on their roadmap and actually care about RYF certification.

They have plans for tablets and other handheld devices down the road.

And honestly their trying to keep one on affordability in a way which doesn't seem to blip most other's radars.

@maiki I also subscribed to the low-risc mailing list recently. http://www.lowrisc.org/about/ Which in theory should be the best early alert for any completely liberated Risc V SoC projects.

@satchmoz I don't know much about RISC-V. This is a confession, but I always see it in the context of *BSD folks getting excited, and that ain't me, so I filed it under: "mostly harmless"/

So I will need to look it up, but what are the broad strokes? Why would an above average OCD technologists care about RISC-V? ^_^

@maiki Completely liberated silicon. Not only the instruction set but many of the chips itself are being designed completely in the open with no royalties. Also unlike other such attempts it's goal is to be competitive with proprietary silicon and scale from micro-controllers to general purpose computers.

Its also much cleaner on the instruction set level than x86 and Arm.

Its also going to possibly serve as the foundation of a new waive of SoCs many of which ought to be completely libre.

@clacke @satchmoz to clarify, the "above average" referred to "OCD", at least for me. ^_^

@maiki ARM for example allows for a lot of extensions onto itself as a processor. Most vendors add on custom and standard extensions in their SoCs which are wholly proprietary that they often don't even own the drivers for. Which creates a lot of proprietary extensions which takes years if not decades for the FLOSS community to reverse engineer.

@satchmoz oh, interesting. I haven't gotten into hardware arch to that level, but the custom extensions certainly explain how markets lean towards closed: they are trying to do a value-add in an oversaturated field, despite everyone basically wanting open systems.

@maiki Im not into hardware arch on that level per se, ive just been lurking in enough mailing lists long enough to know the shape of the problem that has been frustrating me as well as you.

@maiki If we get RISC-V right, it will be an architecture where we can avoid that problem outright.

@maiki BSDs are primarily interested in it because it's an architecture linux doesn't own yet and it's got a lot of Academic interest (i.e. Berkley) so there is historic synergy there.

@satchmoz I sometimes wish I had a reason to jump into a BSD, but I have no practical reason. I just lurk around hoping to gain that magic insight via osmosis. GNU + GNOME does it for me.

@maiki I get it. I didn't touch BSD for a long time and I still load NetBSD down with all the #GNU utilities I think it ought to ship it with.

And honestly I like Gnome a lot too. Though I often wish Gnome was more plugged into the rest of the GNU project.

@satchmoz re: GNU/Gnome, yeah, me too. I mean, I kinda get it, but there seems to be a lot of effort for the same things, coming from different angles.

On one hand I wish I had all the eyes on the the code I use, and on the other hand I am glad folks are building to different philosophies.

Still better than monolithic, corporate OS design!

@maiki I think that is part of the the appeal of the BSDs for some. Each #BSD's base system is developed as a unified whole. There isnt a seperate NetBSD bootloader project independent from the kernel independent from the init system. There is just NetBSD.

Same for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.

There is a unity of purpose & a unity as to what the target is there.

That & the target is Unix.

GNU/Linux sometimes targets world domination; & I get that, but sometimes that is at odds with the other goal.

@maiki Im also keeping one eye on https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ though im wondering if their going to price themselves out of range of my checkbook. As Power9 isn't a cheap architecture.

@maiki also not a whole project but I try to keep one ear out on the OpenMoko listservs for the various people working on stuff like this: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/free-software-cellular-baseband#/

As it's going to be mission critical for phone liberation long term.

@timotheus thanks for the tip, I did browse a few searches and kinda found the basic gist of: Allwinner doesn't share their drivers, and no one else does either, so either deal with it or not, and then there was this really one great tangent about how $YOUR OS sucks, but it seemed like all of them do, and I really still just want a free software machine, like, at all ever.

@notptr Whatcha mean, "user"?

@maiki I might have screwed up something

@sydneyfalk @maiki sorry, small hurricane happened. what's up?

@jkl @maiki

lol, dork

maiki was curious about the PocketCHIP firmware

you have one of those, IIRC? so I made an introduction

@sydneyfalk @maiki oh yes i do. :) whats up @maki?

@jkl glad you survived the hurricane, unrelated to your ability to answer questions. ^_^

I had asked about how "open" the PocketCHIP was, on everything from the firmware to the distro. Lots of folks sent me references.

What is your take on it? I like the novelty and the ability to have a little hacker pad with me. But it is hard to vote with one's wallet in favor of open hardware, when there aren't really any options.

@maiki I haven't really done much with the firmware itself but the chip is a functional device which is more than i can say for the Onion Omega2...