Re: Meltdown / Spectre

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

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On Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 10:18:51PM +0100, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:
> Katherine Cox-Buday wrote on 09/01/18 at 21:13:
> > Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> writes:
> >> [...] how do we square not recommending proprietary globs like this
> >> in official channels with giving users all knowledge required to
> >> decide for themselves?
> > 
> > Yes, this exactly.

[...]

> > against the welfare of users. If an opaque microcode is required to
> > successfully mitigate these bugs, what is the moral stance to take> I
> > don't have an answer and that's why I'm asking here :)
> 
> Logically, it's perfectly sound to extrapolate the above policy to CPUs
> and entire systems. I'm half surprised someone hasn't done so yet: buy a
> Free(er) system, and you're arguably much better off than with even a
> patched non-Free one. And you're voting with your wallet. We all win!
>
> Morally, at least in the short-to-medium term, I'm not convinced.
> The smell of privilege becomes hard to ignore with the costs and other
> assumptions involved.

I think I agree with you here, Tobias.

To me, the right choice is not to suggest that people replace almost
every general-purpose CPU that exists, but rather to help them fix these
bugs while keeping the CPU they've already paid for, and that the
Earth's ecology has already paid for. Even though microcode updates are
not free software.

This is a situation where some definition of "user safety" beats "user
control", in my estimation.

However, my understanding is that this sort of situation has been
discussed by RMS or the FSF, and even then the advice is to favor
software freedom.

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