HidyBush

Nazi warcrimes were punished retroactively for a number or reasons, political and not. One of the most important ones was that what the Nazis did was blatanly wrong. You can't seriously claim that killing millions of people can be justified simply because there isn't a law about it, it's something so intrinsically evil that you can't rely on pure formality.

Arguably, refusing to publish literally every single document pertaining to proprietary hardware is not on the same level of obivous malpractice as a genocide, so I think you could have proposed a milder example to argue your point.

I don't think you've read my reply correctly. If a law were to come out that said "you can't sell any more X unless it complies with Y" we would still have billions of devices that don't comply with Y. So even if a law about open hardware/firmware were to pass in the next few years, we would still need a huge reverse engineering effort to open up all the older devices. Unless you want to argue that, yes, we should forget about those older devices and all jump on the new compliant platform, I think pushing hard for good reverse engineers is a very implortant priority

What's the point of that? One of the benefit of having a FOSS platform is that you can keep supporting and updating hardware and software that in the normal proprietary economy would have been abandoned a mere few years after entering the market. If instead of pushing for reverse engineering we simply made more and more people buy Linux-compatible devices (which still doesn't mean they'd run FOSS) we would have a humongous amount of perfectly fine hardware locked down and unable to be properly used.

Are all laws retroactive? The EU has now mandated the use of USB-C, does that mean I can bring my iPhone 4 to Apple and have them solder the new port?

What is done is done. Even if some piece of legislation were to come out tomorrow all the older devices would still be completely closed off. Would we have to collectively just push to move to the new open-by-default devices or should we persist in reverse engineering the older stuff?

It seems to me that what the FOSS world needs in order to succeed is an extreme push towards forming a class of programmers specialized in reverse engineering. We already have plenty of capable coders who have written so much useful software, but does is matter if we can't use all the hardware at our disposal? Our devices are filled to the brim with accelerators, sensors and assorted specialized hardware that we could be taking advantage of, but they are all buried behind proprietary drivers or just plain inaccessible firmware.

Are you seriously telling me you expect an ARM board running mainline Linux to play virtualized Android games? This is beyond beyond disingenuous, is somebody paying you to write this or what?

It can play 4k videos and it can play games, but expecting it to play 4k videos through an unoptimized browser with DRM and play virtualized games is extremely disingenuous.

Don't you think there's a difference between "it's annoying I can't watch full blown movies on this experimental phone" and "it's garbage because no Netflix"?

So you backed a developer-oriented project all about open source software and your test to see if it was garbage or not is to consume proprietary video content and play video games through virtualization?

>unproductive

tell me more about how updating your car's UI overnight can make you more productive

>you can update the UI of a car with a touchscreen but not one with buttons

A car is a dependable tool. Changing the UI during a car's lifetime is dangerous and unprofessional. I'd say the same is true for smartphones and computers but I guess the majority of people think of them as simple "cool entertainment devices"

Where have I implied that "conservative" means "racist"? If they meant the same to me I could have just written "conservative" instead of specifying "racist"

How can a server know I'm using a different client if all the features are implemented? The condition that you may not use a third party client cannot be imposed by the API but is stipulated externally.