Re: Meltdown / Spectre

[Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com>]

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

>> 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.

I really appreciate the viewpoints expressed here, thank you. It's a
great reminder that software freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that
its intent is to do good. It's worth considering what that means in a
more global context.

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

I've been reading up on the philosophical differences between BSD and
GNU licenses, and one of the points that's often made is that BSD is the
freer of the two -- allowing users to do as they please -- but GNU
expresses the most freedom globally and is therefore more ethical.

It is a fun thought experiment to extrapolate and apply the same logic
to this situation: what would express the most freedom globally:
faithfully applying the GPL, or assisting users with securing their
computing environments.

Please note that I'm advocating any approach; only having a nice
discussion with like-minded folks.

-- 
Katherine