Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[Jean Louis]

* Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> [2020-10-20 16:50]:
> Consider Intel and Purism. What considers me, they are both US based
> private business (I don't know how much US or private Intel is, but I
> guess). So what we are doing is exchanging a blob for company A for a
> blob of company B. Blob from B should disable blob from A. How do I know
> B is not run secretely by some goverment organisation that likes
> to spy on it's own citizens and foreign ones. Just recently we learned
> there was a supposedly independent Swiss company that sold a
> cryptography machines to goverments all over the world. It turned out it
> was secretely collaborating with CIA that gott keys to decrypt
> everyone's secrets :D. Russians never bought it, but some other
> countries did.

You cannot know.

Difference between Intel and Purism is way too big, Purism is
providing fully free operating system that is somehow verified and
endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. Those are reasons why Purism
gets trust points.

Intel is already known to spy on millions, there are reasons not to
trust Intel.

Trust in the second definition in Wordnet dictionary is following:

2. (3) reliance, trust -- (certainty based on past experience; "he
wrote the paper with considerable reliance on the work of other
scientists"; "he put more trust in his own two legs than in the gun")

What we know about Intel about past experiences? Huge insecurity. By
having MINIX operating system in the CPU, doing what it wants, I do
not know what type of true control I have over my computing.

What we know about Purism about past experiences? They are providing
full free operating system, liberating people, giving them control
over their computing.

You can observe what groups are doing, you can hire independent
security researcher to verify the software, if that is expensive, you
may rely on groups by looking what are they doing.

> Idea of blobs is bad; and Dr. Richard S. is completelycorrect about
> blobs not being acceptable. But then, we need to live in this world
> as it is; so we need a sustianable solution for the future. I don't
> know if limiting what Emacs can do on capabilities of a machine from
> the past is a best strategy; but I am not very wise, and certainly
> did not do enough research and thinking in the area, so this is just
> my ramblings and consideration; unfortunately I have no answers
> myself.

What I can see over last 20 years, there was no free operating system
for phones, today we have several, we have free operating systems for
computers, and many proprietary software liberated, even huge
corporation like Microsoft contributes to free software. Many social
improvements sprung up from free software movement.

Today after 20 years, we do not need to live in this world "as it is",
we know we can improve conditions, even by only promoting set of
principles. And it requires uncompromised stubbornes. Today we are
exposed to spying more than in old times.