Re: Fwd: PayPal pool for developer M1 Mac mini for OpenBSD port

Hi Jeff,

as far as Im aware... if you donate to the project they will source
hardware as the project sees fit..
if there is an M1 in want.html (where a developer is looking for one to
make an initial POC before the project considers it viable to spend
resources...
it I would be happy to contribute... for that purpose ..

I dont think anyone has anything specific against apple. per sya..
there are objections to proprietary firmware... and binary blobs...
and this makes development of OpenSource Systems even harder than it
already is...

but yes tthe M1 looks awesome it will be interesting to see if they open
it up (a little) ... but it is an arm chip ... so perhaps testing and
providing
open arm hardware would help the project more... check out want.html

all of these are my own observations as a user over the years and im not
a developer in OpenBSD

Thanks
Tom SMyth





On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 at 22:11, Jeff Joshua Rollin <jeff@jeffjoshua.club>
wrote:

>
>
>
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> Subject: Fwd: PayPal pool for developer M1 Mac mini for OpenBSD port
> Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2020 21:56:51 +0000
> From: Jeff Joshua Rollin <jeff@jeffjoshua.club>
>
>
>
>
>
> Oops, forgot to reply to the list. Sorry for the duplicate, Mihai.
>
>
> On 03/12/2020 01:18, Mihai Popescu wrote:
> > I have only good wishes for the project, but I still don't get one thing:
> > why do some people start to behave oddly whenever Apple comes into
> > discussion.
> > They are doing a proprietary thing, closed as hell, no documentation
> > and so
> > on. Why is this impulse to write code for such a thing. Just asking ...
>
> Apple make great products. My iMac, which is nearly ten years old, runs
> without problems even today (try that with Windows). iPads and iPhones
> have much better lifetimes than Android devices - we'll see if the
> increasing number of devices running "real Linux" make a dent in the
> market, but either way there are AFAIK no phones using any of the BSDs
> (unless you count macOS/iOS, which for these purposes I don't) anyway.
>
> Other than the fact that the platform is proprietary, the only other
> thing that annoys me about Macs, and always has, is their half-arsed
> attempt at a British keyboard, which unless it's changed since my iMac
> was manufactured still puts @ and " in the wrong places for Brits -
> exactly the opposite places on a US keyboard. (Even Commodore, infamous
> in its day for reliability problems and which bought the Amiga company
> in what no less august an institution than Amiga Format magazine called
> "a rare fit of insight," managed that one.) Fortunately, if you also use
> Linux/UNIX, the problem of switching between keyboards with @ and " in
> 'the wrong place' is easily solved for X11 by selecting a Mac UK
> keyboard in the software settings even on a PC. (They did stubbornly
> stick with that crap butterfly keyboard for four years, for reasons
> presumably best known to themselves, but luckily that era also seems to
> be over, and I didn't bother buying one during that time, for that and
> other reasons.)
>
> As for the proprietaryness, other than the fact that it's a nice new
> hardware architecture as other people have mentioned, pretty much every
> other architecture OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linux has ever run on (Amiga, Sun
> and VAX, for example) is/was proprietary. And that's without considering
> the closed peripherals (without which OpenBSD wouldn't have to eschew
> NDAs) or the BMC on a Wintel - heaven knows what that thing really gets
> up to.
>
> My £0.02
>
> Jeff.
>
>

--
Kindest regards,
Tom Smyth.