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Comment by mpnordland | Hacker News Reader

It's great that these guys pushing POWER8 at least have a workable situation, but at least for me, throwing $3,700 at a motherboard (Alone!) just isn't feasible. I would love to be free of proprietary firmware, but it would seem that's only for people better off than myself.

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Consider the news of the Model 3 this week. There is no reason POWER8 cannot follow a similar trajectory, start with the Roadster equivalent $4k luxury workstation, move down to the performance desktop around $1500, and then release the mass market mobile / integrated board at $300 that can still go head to head with x86.

It can, but IBM doesn't care about those markets. OpenPOWER members could make their own stuff and aim it at consumers, it just takes a long time given OpenPOWER itself is only a couple years old.

You can buy a Libreboot-compatible Thinkpad X60 for $50. It is absolutely not the case that fully free firmware is only available by paying lots of money.

Yes there is even a company shipping T400 and X200 Thinkpads pre-installed with libreboot and I see they have now an option for a server: https://minifree.org/

You have to start with a single step. Costs could go down over time.

You're absolutely right; Most advances do eventually trickle down. But, most advances in FOSS have benefited users who are less well off, making computing, both libre and in general, more available to them. It's frustrating that in order to get a truly free computer one has to pay about the equivalent of 3 months wage, which is a no go for most people I know.

While I agree with you, the average buyer of computer components is used to spending an order of magnitude less on a motherboard. A person can go to their usual source of computer parts and pick up a motherboard for a couple hundred USD at the high end. A few thousand USD for motherboard that does not offer an order of magnitude improvement in raw speed or expandability is going to be a very hard sell.

The question is rather: Is there a large overlap between the people who can afford to spend thousands of dollars for a free (as freedom) POWER8 workstation and the open source idealists who would love to buy such a free device?

It doesn't include the CPU itself?

According to the side it's include "entry-level 8-core 130W POWER8 CPU". It's still damn expensive.

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