We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 31st, 2022.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests were Christian Walker and Philipp Deppenwiese. Other speakers included Lucas. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
- @1:20 Time zones, coworking across the globe
- a 12-hour time dfference is unworkable
- Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - Terrible book
- Open Source Firmware conference
- @14:40 Firmware trajectory
- It felt like firmware was going to be proprietary forever
- Things were a little open before, probably hit maximally proprietary around 2012
- Bloomberg Super Micro story
- Trammel Hudson's 'Modchips of the state' talk
- Spectre and Meltdown
- Nested components and hidden cores and firmware hiding everywhere
- SOCs, systems on a chip
- @29:30 OSFF
- Open-Source Firmware Foundation
- Adam's Linux Foundation shakedown story
- Linux Foundation financials
- @40:40 defining firmware
- Requires a physical artifact, and that physical thing is what's being sold
- Awaiting watershed moment when everything flips from default closed to default open
- Hallmarks of budding success: One of the large closed-source vendors (AMI) trying to get into the open-source model
- Companies don't want to even document their firmware right now
- What open source means to the community is different than what it means to SOC vendors
- As a customer, you can make it part of your business case that you value open technology stacks, including firmware
- Vendors use the line "our customers aren't asking for this"
- Adam's SSD vendor conversation - going to be a long time to get that open, mumble mumble, something lawyers
- Making gains for some vendors meant "we started using Git" and also living indoors.
- Open sourcing firmware would reveal design decisions of the underlying hardware. The open question is: do those decisions on their own represent any secret sauce?
- Corporate Open Source Anti-patterns talk
- @1:10:40 licensing agreements preventing open sourcing
- No one likes binary blobs, they should be as small as possible and as few as possible, but we need to accommodate them, or we'll get nothing.
- Getting involved with the OSFF - Homepage, Newsletter, Slack Channel
- Could use a hand with organizational work, not just technical
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!