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Comment by anonms-coward | Hacker News Reader

It seems stallman had the foresight to predict things like this in 1997. I think the days where one needs to be licensed to use a debugger might not be far away.

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> I think the days where one needs to be licensed to use a debugger might not be far away.

GNU/Linux and the BSDs have never before looked so essential to the survival of computing as we know it.

Yet, one of the main companies behind Linux is Microsoft and one of the main companies behind BSD is Apple. It's really hard not to have a negative outlook on both.

Apple is not behind BSD at all, using Darwin is not being behind BSD. Any of the the popular BSD distributions is not backed by Apple. Not to mention Microsoft needs linux, not the other way around. Microsoft is desperate to get linux developers on windows, using WSL. They had to rename Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. Linux would not be affected at all if Microsoft stops contributing. Azure will be if it stops offering Linux VMs.

Apple doesn't rule a shit over OpenBSD.

What good is Linux and free software if the hardware won't let us run the programs we want? Computers could ship with a preconfigured Linux distribution that does all sorts of abusive things and since we wouldn't have the cryptographic keys to the machine it's impossible to do anything about it.

In the future, all computers could very well be just like video game consoles: devices which refuse to run software not cryptographically signed by their true owners. Software development kits are restricted to corporations and likely provised under strict licenses and NDAs. Users are supposed to just consume content within the narrow context defined by corporations. We're not supposed to create or change anything. They don't want us to be able to run software they don't approve of.

Regarding the hardware, that is why we should support and use open and free hardware solutions, such as the Librem phone etc.

We need to go much lower. Down to more manufacturers of POWER9 or RISC-V based systems.

This reminds me of ARM SBCs including the raspberry pi. The manufacturer creates a device specific build of Linux. Usually the vendor doesn't care and just provides you with an ancient 2.6 kernel because the SoC vendor provides GPU drivers that only support 2.6. There are also often device specific modifications in the kernel and since Chinese vendors don't care about upholding the GPL they just give you the kernel without source code.

Ironically nobody cares about these SBCs because of their poor software support for new versions of the linux kernel.

Fair enough. The FOSS operating systems are not sufficient to save computing as we know it. But they are necessary. So I don't think it's wrong to bring up their importance. Hardware under our control won't do us any good if we don't have the software.

I think macOS already blocks the debugger. You couldn't debug iTunes last I checked.

You can't debug anything via lldb/gdb without having an administrator password AFAIK. You can debug non native programs using for example pdb and other language specific debuggers, but I find it hard to make that more inconvenient anytime soon.

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