How to talk to skeptics?

[smartin at disroot.org]

December 18, 2022 at 4:20 PM, Jeremiah at pdp10.guru wrote:
> 
> > 
> > (i.e. to bootstrap linux from hex0 in practice you need to run it on
> >  linux anyway https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap ).
> > 
> 
> Oh then you missed our latest work:
> https://github.com/ironmeld/builder-hex0.git
> 
> We wrote a POSIX kernel in under 4KB of hex0 that we can bootstrap with
> a single bootloader binary and it is able to run all the steps needed to
> get to TCC. We are currently working on getting it to build a more
> powerful POSIX kernel written in C and built by the TCC it can run; with
> the hopes of it carrying us all the way to Linux.
> 
> (we have a few hurdles to do first:
> https://gist.github.com/rick-masters/54204c0b6b369748b4a1aaf2a4da22cf )
> 
> But it is a reasonable amount of effort we can certainly do.
> 
> After that, we will solve the hardware problem too ^_^
> 
> -Jeremiah
>

That's really awesome work like many other out there https://codeberg.org/StefanK/MinimalBinaryBoot . I hope it won't end up as yet another failed project that stuck somewhere in the middle of the road. But shouldn't we focus first on fixing the hardware instead of constantly forking each other with biased software? Why China developing their own completely new native hardware architectures from scratch is straggling so much to port any public software on it? Even in RISCV we have serious issues to bootstrap Guix without crosscompilation or just to reproduce popular software like Rust, etc. Is it really so hard even for top world universities to create at least theoretical model of perfectly libre, formally verifiable and auditable hardware(linux capable) that could serve as a ground truth device for further transparent, bootstrappable and reproducible research? Without this base requirement don't you feel like a surgeon operating humans that only knows frogs anatomy? I have an impression that if nothing change in this topic the future history books will describe our times as an Open-Source big illusion era.


Cheers!
Martin