Hello everyone,
I’ve been wondering, why has no one built an entirely free (as in freedom) computer yet? For humans to be unable to share each other’s knowledge to build one of the most important technologies ever created for society, how is it that we have yet to have full knowledge about how our systems operate?
I get that companies are basically the ones to blame, and I know there are alternatives like the Talos II by Raptor Computing, but still, how do we not have publicly available full schematics for just one modern computer? I’m talking down to firmware-level stuff like proprietary ECs, microcode, hard drive/SSD firmware, network controllers, etc. How do we not have a fully open system yet?
There is absolutely no system of government or economics that would make it feasible to manufacture microchips in your garage.
Communist China and Soviet Russia would do it.
They wouldn’t be any good, but they’d do it.
No. No government would build microchip manufacturing plants in people’s garages.
This isn’t a problem caused by capitalism. The machines needed are highly specialized and require extremely tight tolerances. Both of those things require a lot of very expensive equipment to make.
You have to remember that we’re talking about billions if not trillions of transistors on a single chip. That’s not something you can just DIY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
It’s a parallel. Mao tried to create industry in people’s backyards. It took people away from food production, destroyed existing valuable metal products, deforested the areas, and for all that effort, resulted in product with quality so bad it was unusable.
While it would probably also be more like input material production, silicon ingots and wafer slicing and such, I’m sure the quality would equally be removed enough to be unusable. Especially since metalwork tolerances are usually in micrometers at best, but microchips are in the nanometers.
You’re vastly underestimating the gulf of complexity between metal fabrication and processor manufacturing.
If this was even remotely feasible, don’t you think China would have done it for the several year long microchip shortage?
Yes, I understand there are orders of magnitude of complexity between the two. And no, it’s not remotely feasible, like I said, they wouldn’t be any good. If anything, I’m agreeing with you that no system of government, or system of economics for that matter, would make it practical.