Increasing occurrence of platform problems

[Ben Scott]

On 4/13/07, Seth Cohn <sethcohn at gnuhampshire.org> wrote:
> Actually, the real solution is the open source one, not the closed
> source Apple/Sun/HP one....

  Ehh....

  Open Source firmware  would enable participation by "everyone" and
make it possible for "anyone" to fix problems, absolutely, and that
would likely be a big win for just about everyon.  But that doesn't
mean incompatibilities would magically disappear.  Just because
NVidia's video card firmware was Open Source wouldn't guarantee it
would work with Asus's Open Source motherboard firmware.

  It's not like I can take a system script from Red Hat RHEL 5 and
drop it into my Debian "Etch" system and expect it to work flawlessly.

  It's also not like Open Source is bug free.  It just lets "everyone"
find and fix the bugs.  That's a big improvement, sure, but it's not a
panacea.  And crap code is crap code, regardless of how Open Source it
is.  I've seen plenty of FOSS crap code.

  Open Source does not guarantee the bugs will be fixed.  There is at
least one known data eating bug in GNU tar that has existed for years
and years and which *still* (AFAIK) have not been fixed.  I looked at
the source code once, to try and fix it.  I still have nightmares.
And we trust our data to that thing.

  Further, in the context of the discussion, Open BIOS would be just
another de facto standard/industry consortium.  If everyone decided
tomorrow that, say, Phoenix Technologies would be in charge of
engineering all firmware for use on the PC platform, that would solve
most of the problems given in the original message, too.

  I don't see FOSS as a silver bullet here, sorry.  An improvement,
yes, but not a panacea.

  Unrelated: Please trim quoted material when replying.  I'm not going
to get into the top-post/top-quote debate, since that's largely a
matter of background and personal preference, and is thus mostly
subjective.  But blasting out pages of quoted text is not a subjective
"which end of the egg to break" decision.  Thanks.

-- Ben