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838 points alsetmusic | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.336s | source
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ActorNightly ◴[] No.45034798[source]
Im glad she stepped away from Asahi linux. Its absolutely great from a techincal perspective and the progress that team has made, but talented people like her shouldn't be trying to reverse engineer software/hardware from shitty anti-consumer company that can make the entire project work in a heartbeat by publishing documentation, in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up.
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1. amiga386 ◴[] No.45050209[source]
Ultimately we didn't need Jon Lech Johansen's work (and Derek Fawcus's, and others') on cracking DVD DRM or cracking Apple's FairPlay DRM, as there have always been alternatives. But their efforts did push the fight against DRM in our favour, and who knows what the world would be like if we had done nothing?

Creating things is a gamble, as mass adoption is almost never by technical merits, but by marketing. So you could make open documented everything but still end up with nobody benefiting from that openness, because a competitor (whether open or not) wipes you out. You saw this happen even in the era where electronic devices were expected to come with full schematics -- there were winners and losers even then.

But, if something has become widespread and well adopted, and it's not open, that's a problem. It absolutely should be opened up and documented. Especially if it's not because the money-grubbing creators of the something are deliberately hiding how it works and locking down control in order to extract more money from everyone else's pockets. The sooner you put an end to that, and the more often you fight against that, the sooner society itself becomes more efficient and fairer for everyone.