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Comment by Eikon | Hacker News Reader

What’s the point of open source for consumers, expect for maybe education, when you can’t produce something from the source yourself nor be sure the product you buy is made from the source?

It’s very cost prohibitive to run a batch through a semiconductor fab. You are not going to request one offs unless you have a few millions to spare.

It’s not like running make after cloning some sources.

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Well the barriers are pretty low today. Even fairly small companies like Axis (they make security cameras) or ubiquiti (routers and access points) can work with CPU vendors to license their tech and get a custom CPU. With an opensource IP the barrier will be even lower. Maybe even within a well funded kickstarter range.

Maybe for a killer home router with a 100% open hardware+software platform that can route 8 ports of 5Gbit/port at line speed that would more trusted than random commodity hardware.

Or something to handle say 8 security cameras and use machine learning to handle all 8 streams for not just motion detection, but also identifying what person/object is in each stream.

I'd certainly pay a premium for smart devices in my home that I knew that I could trust, wasn't spying on me, doesn't require cloud connections, used open APIs/standards, and wouldn't die with the next time a company dies, gets bored, gets greedy, get purchased, etc.

I’m curious about the ubiquiti custom CPU, can you share a link to more info ? Thanks

"Custom CPU" seems like a bit of a stretch. They have ASIC people on staff (eg https://rocketreach.co/ya-chau-yang-email_61973123), but based on the fact that you can flash basically all their devices with OpenWRT (including those disc-shaped APs), I think the "ASIC" is just a conventional ARM or MIPS core with some peripherals geared toward hardware acceleration of common network tasks— switch routing, vlan tagging, etc.

This page talks about the specific features available for hardware offloading:

https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006567467-EdgeRou...

This is not accurate, Axis is NOT a small company by any standards, they have done ASICs since the 1980's and a tape-out there now is in the $10M range or more I'm sure, and then we're talking about the same amount in salaries to do all design and testing.

It's fun to have access to HDL code but it's simply not possible to actually turn it into chips as an OSS effort.

FPGA-stuff is the way to go I think. The HW cost will be much higher but you can muck around with it as a lone engineer in your home with a turnaround time of minutes.

>What’s the point of open source for consumers

faster iteration and development and more competition means more innovation and cheaper prices and more choice for consumers.

The primary benefactor of open source has never literally been the consumer because only an exceedingly small niche of people makes use of the source directly. The biggest benefactor is the ecosystem as a whole.

For consumers the great thing about open source has never been that they can run make in a terminal. It's been that people can run make in a terminal who can then produce products for consumers.

There are efforts such as https://libresilicon.com/ to design open source processes to manufacture silicon chips at the small scale. I am hopeful that these efforts will bring down one-off cost to the 10k USD level or less.

> What’s the point of open source for consumers

See Venezuela and Adobe. See the trade war with China and Huawei's position...

I don't understand why this is. As the high end stuff gets down to 10nm-ish, shouldn't it have gotten way cheaper to fabricate micron-precision chips?

AIUI, you can just use FPGA on a 10nm-ish process and get roughly the same performance as hardwired logic on a micron-precision chip. Still useful for analog though, and I imagine that going even a bit lower but still very cheap (in the hundred-nm range, perhaps) would still yield better performance than a state-of-the-art FPGA, given the one- or two-orders-of-magnitude overhead that's inherent in those.

Is there's open-source FPGA? (I mean not reverse-engineered which relies on mercy of the manufacturer who can discontinue it anytime)

Just for that reason there's no point really, you can just switch in the next generation FPGA (more or less) as the high-level HDL stays the same.

Then there is no point in open source C compiler, either? The language stays the same...

Open source doesn't have to mean without resources. Imagine the big tech companies banding together to build better processors in the open.

For example Google's OpenTitan.

It opens the source so many more companies can work on products enjoyed by consumers.

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