Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Reverse Engineering

[Fabio Pesari]

On 02/06/2016 09:00 PM, Mike Gerwitz wrote:
> I agree that we need completely free systems from the hardware up.  But
> as someone with two young children and a new house, living off of a
> single income while my wife is finishing up her schooling, I can't even
> come close to affording new hardware.  My current laptop is one that I
> scavenged years ago, and dislike very much.  My desktop PC (which I use
> as a server; laptop is more of a thin client than anything) is older
> than the laptop.

The issue of high prices for new hardware is related to having to depend
on hardware manufacturers.

I don't know how much it costs to build your typical board but I expect
it's done for a very cheap sum of money by Asian wage slaves (often
children) or robots.

Now, where does most of the earnings go? Patents, I suspect, and of
course investors. So I would have to assume that most hardware is
unjustly priced, compared to its production cost (even taking into
account research and QA costs), and things are never going to change
unless manufacture is decentralized.

Also, new hardware is getting more and more restrictive thanks to things
like UEFI and DRM, and I don't think that's slowing down anytime soon!

So, while for now it is a good and sustainable thing to buy old
hardware, we should not forget that our priority is to make sure the
future is more ethical, and that can only happen by focusing our efforts
(and money) on projects which can free us from present and future
limitations like libre hardware designs rather than try to overcome old
ones via a time-consuming process like reverse engineering.