tpearson-raptor

Nothing formal, but if the service itself does go down (i.e. your VPS drops and can't be restarted due to a service problem, or connectivity fails, etc.) refunds / service credits would be issued. We really haven't encountered this enough to have a formal policy as of yet -- the redundancies we use are quite good.

Timothy Pearson from Raptor here...so if storage becomes a main concern it definitely becomes less expensive to lease a dedicated box vs. a VPS from Integricloud, and that's by design to some extent. The Integricloud architecture is centered more on making sure that your data stays private than competing directly with Amazon etc. that simply don't have the ability to make any assurances beyond general platitudes in that area (for starters, they don't control the firmware on their own machines), and the design (and pricing) reflect this different approach to cloud services.

The dedicated boxes are also unlimited data transfer, and you can put in some fairly large storage arrays inexpensively. We have a bunch of projects that are using dedicated boxes for development work, for example we sponsor Adelie Linux with one, and so far they've been very happy with the service.

Anyone wanting control of a powerful modern computer is part of the target market. We just haven't been able to drive the price down further at this time -- doing hardware design around fully open source firmware is hard and a lot of the typical shortcuts to lower costs (including the always-concerning "post-sale monetization" concepts) simply aren't something we find acceptable on any level.

Basically, it doesn't do anyone any good for us to lower cost by giving up the full owner control experience that is centric to our product lines. :)

Keep an eye out for an EU distributor of ours -- probably sometime late this month / early next if all goes well...

I wouldn't be surprised -- it's a gaping hole for anticheat software if not addressed. In fact, long term the anticheat is going to have to require a completely locked-down (console-like) experience from boot firmware (ME/PSP attested) through OS and userspace, or it will not be effective.

Which is one reason why I don't rent games on Steam, and why I bought a PS4 instead. If I'm going to have to game on a completely locked down system, I vastly prefer to do it on a system that doesn't touch any of my personal data and for which I can still buy permanent, resalable (and yes, even lendable) games on physical media.

PC gaming hasn't interested me since Steam on Windows with mandatory anticheat became the primary way to play games.

> Provide a path to a $1300 laptop that is POWER based (and not crippled "slow 1 core SMT1" stuff from IBM's dead-bin) and you might entice System76 and Purism.

I just gave them a path to a desktop that is POWER based, with very low up front costs (basically take their existing Thelio chassis, swap mainboards from x86 to POWER, do some software builds of Pop!_OS, and do a trial launch). I think that's a far more reasonable initial trial than going for a full laptop. It's also relatively consumer friendly, especially in today's cloud era where the proprietary apps people are using might just well be behind a web browser in the first place.

If they were a laptop-only company I'd agree with your assessment (I'm not happy with the GPU situation at all, that's the primary blocker for a libre laptop), but they're a laptop and desktop company. That means there's more ways they can test market owner controlled systems than a full up laptop design with massive design + tooling costs for an uncertain return.

I wouldn't be here if I didn't see a bunch of headlines yesterday that made it sound like these new laptops have proper open firmware.

They don't. That's why I'm here, to provide the missing other half of the story.

The general answer is yes and yes. That's why OMI / OpenCAPI are being released as standards, with RTL / HDL. I think at this point there would be more appetite for a next gen interface like DDR5 vs. DDR4 to be released, but I'm just speaking personally from general knowledge here.

OK, I think I may have been misunderstood...

What they are doing in that space is valuable. However, with just a bit more tweaking, they could offer something a whole lot more valuable in parallel, and leave this whole semi-open x86 issue behind. If they were to offer even a couple of actually open source firmware systems, and indicate somewhere in the marketing that the x86 boxes are only partly open source, that would not only eliminate the entire controversy here but also allow them to take the next logical step in open software. If their core mission has basically been to make open source easy to consume, that's a worthy goal; why not go a bit further and make open source on open hardware with fully open firmware just as easy to consume?

Clearly there's demand, from the comments in this thread alone!

You might be ascribing quite a bit more leverage to System76 than they actually have here. No one is going to get Intel or AMD to allow open PSP/ME firmware -- AIUI even Google, with the truckloads of chips they buy, isn't able to influence that decision at either x86 vendor. Plus, System76 isn't the ODM -- that's Clevo from what I understand, so their influence on the two x86 CPU vendor(s) will be so far removed as to be quite insignificant IME.

Now, offering something else (ARM, RISC-V, POWER, anything but x86) as a truly open source alternative, then seeing if there was any reaction, might start to apply some small degree of leverage. Definitely there would be more potential opportunities to meaningfully discuss design goals with silicon vendors other than Intel and AMD. Who knows, maybe this could still happen...it'd be pretty easy / cheap to get some POWER desktop offerings lined up based on existing mainboards, and Clevo might be persuaded to do an ARM laptop design based on one of the Chromebook SoCs... ;)

With our baseline blob-free systems, we picked parts that were firmware-free, had open firmware, or could have open firmware written in the future. This is why we don't have onboard 100Gbe, Thunderbolt, or other interfaces that would require relinquishing control of the system to an external vendor. However, the resulting products are quite functional as both PCs and servers, with no real complaints or concerns over the I/O given the multiple PCIe Gen 4 slots available. My understanding is that very few ODMs do this, as they don't want to make that tradeoff, but this is how you apply leverage to silicon vendors long term. And you know what? It's working (outside the GPU sphere at least) -- Raptor isn't the only one pushing hard on these topics from the OpenPOWER side, and so far we've been able to get the silicon we need for our current product lines.

Actually, yes! We're closely monitoring the development progress of the open toolchains for various FPGAs; with POWER ISA now being open for implementation by anyone anywhere, I could easily see a future where extremely sensitive work is seamlessly moved from a large closed ASIC like the current IBM POWER chips to a completely software compatible, but significantly slower, soft SoC running in an FPGA. Or even an ASIC, if methods are eventually developed to verify the ASICs match the input design files at scale (i.e. non-destructive testing).

This seamless transition is one of the key benefits of an open ISA in my mind; development and testing of algorithms can be handled on the closed but top of the line (i.e. extremely powerful) ASIC, then when sensitive data is being handled that same binary can literally be run without changes on the soft core or other slower, but open, system. You could even compile on the slower ultra-trusted system, and test the binary on the larger ASIC -- lots of interesting possibilities here!

Yep, I figured as much. We'd love to do a laptop, we're literally just stalled on the GPU. This is where a consortium of ODMs and OEMs could possibly effect change, the combined buying power is probably enough to get custom GPU silicon sans-DRM and locking created. Only question is, does enough willpower exist from the other ostensibly open vendors at this time to actually work toward that goal with us? ;)

That may be. However, I was using Linux on bog-standard computers before System76 was even founded -- preinstalling Linux on a computer isn't exactly revolutionary, and it's in a completely different league from the work that has been required to bring up entire new CPUs (!) to compete with the increasingly locked x86 systems.

No idea where you're getting a kilowatt from. My desktop uses maybe 120W or so, with a lot of that going to the AMD GPU.

If we're going to trade barbs over ecological damage, what happens to all those Intel and AMD systems that would have been useable if they had just had updates to the locked/signed firmware, but are instead floating around in landfills because the vendor decided they wanted to enforce their control and not issue security updates?

I still don't understand why you would even care about the firmware if you're running Windows. To me, that would be like building a fortified, ultra-secure rear doorway into a run down barn with a gaping hole where the front doors used to be.

If these efforts were even potentially likely to result in open x86 systems someday, I wouldn't be as opposed to them as I am now. But when you have both x86 silicon vendors on record as being contractually and legally unable, let alone unwilling, to allow owner control, all I see is a massive waste of effort with a known incomplete (i.e. partly closed) endgame. Worse, that effort is detracting from other efforts that are providing fully open computing right now, today.

My recommendation has always been to use the commodity x86 world's greatest advantage if you have to use Windows: cost. Get the absolute cheapest possible Windows system you can find that still has enough power to support your clients, plan on replacing it every so often as Windows churns along, and actually invest in a secure, open computer for everything else.

x86 is a closed ISA with closed, locked, signed firmware. All appearances are that it will stay that way permanently, with just enough late-stage open firmware allowed to create sufficient marketing confusion in less technical circles. Why not select and embrace one of the open ISAs for non-Windows computing? Who knows, you might be helping make secure / non-hostile computing happen on a large scale just a little bit faster! :)