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Evacuating The Titanic Home
Thu, 5 Jul 2018 Linux-libre
"CQD CQD SOS Titanic Position 41.44 N 50.24 W. Require immediate
assistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking." GitWeb
It's one of the distress calls sent by the Titanic in the early hours of April 15, 1912. How To
Titanic was the largest ship in the world at the time, and seems an apt analogy to
Intel's x86 processors. Articles
x86 seems a sinking ship to me for software freedom. Newer machines have fatal
freedom problems and the ones we can use without those problems are out of RSS Feed
production (mostly; except for the KGPE-D16.) Those that aren't being produced
anymore will become harder and harder to find over time, which is a big problem for About Me
our own sustainability.
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It's very much like Stallman described in his talk from LibrePlanet a few years ago:
GPL enforced
If you appreciate any of the things I
am doing you can make a donation.
Thinking on all this is what got me to decide to embrace support for other CPU
architectures, starting with the IBM Power CPUs. I have added this support to my APT
repository for Linux-libre. It needs POWER8 or above, like those machines from
Raptor Engineering.
There's no way to know what is going to work out well for software freedom in the long
term. It doesn't make sense to put all of our eggs in one basket. Indeed, there can be
multiple efforts going on and EOMA68 and RISC-V both seem interesting too.
Let's begin a planned and orderly evacuation of x86. This will take years. Please put
your life jackets on and proceed to the boat deck. It's very cold out tonight. I
understand the Carpathia is making full steam ahead for us.
Copyright © 2018 Jason Self. See license.shtml for license conditions. Please copy and share.