One year ago, AWS deleted my 10-year account over a disputed $100 bill.
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One year ago, AWS deleted my 10-year account over a disputed $100 bill. That day I learned something uncomfortable: unless you are a customer capable of causing a PR disaster, your monthly bill doesn’t buy much leverage.
That same week I noticed something else.
Vendor lock-in isnt just a cloud problem. Its a hardware problem too.
Here in Tangier (Morocco), there are warehouses filled with computers that Europe has already written off. Machines with 2-8 GB of RAM and 64-256 GB SSDs, sold by the pallet for almost nothing after being discarded by companies upgrading their fleets.
The hardware wasnt broken. The software had simply moved on.
The OS kept nagging users to upgrade, only to tell them afterward that their computer was too old to run the upgrade.
That is software gaslighting hardware into becoming e-waste. LOL.
So I started buying them.
In the past months I have bought over 5,000 discarded computers, not to build a datacenter, but to understand them, resurrect them, and eventually donate many of them.
That project became ChaosBSD.
In just six months, ChaosBSD has landed 87 upstream commits (it is not a AI number, lol). Ironically, after I started buying old hardware, the prices of SSDs and RAM even DDR2 went through the roof.
Drivers are unlike almost every other subsystem. Frameworks get rewritten. Filesystems get replaced. APIs evolve. But silicon doesn’t get updates. A driver is either correct, incomplete, or it never gets merged. Once it is upstream, it often stays there for decades. I updated drivers that were not touched for 24 years.
Losing my AWS account taught me not to trust a single cloud provider.
ChaosBSD was my answer to the same problem in hardware.
The project was never just about my machines. The drivers went upstream, so every FreeBSD user benefits from them.
If you have an Intel Apple computer, you can install FreeBSD 16 or DragonFlyBSD on it. The computer will feel snappier than it original OS.
@seuros You bought FIVE THOUSAND old computers? Do you live in a warehouse or something?
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@seuros You bought FIVE THOUSAND old computers? Do you live in a warehouse or something?
@guenther I don't have have 5000 computer now. I buy a pallet with 300 mac minis or 200 laptops, ect ... (they are cheap because not all of them are working, or marked as working)
I take 1-2 at home, make get the drivers, install them.
The vendor handle the logistic to deliver them to some place that need them. -
A abekonge@venner.network shared this topic
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@guenther I don't have have 5000 computer now. I buy a pallet with 300 mac minis or 200 laptops, ect ... (they are cheap because not all of them are working, or marked as working)
I take 1-2 at home, make get the drivers, install them.
The vendor handle the logistic to deliver them to some place that need them.@seuros Wow! So basically there's now a shop somewhere in Tangier that's selling computers with freebsd preinstalled?
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@seuros Wow! So basically there's now a shop somewhere in Tangier that's selling computers with freebsd preinstalled?
@guenther No.
The stores are all over Morocco , One contact got me access to another....
They have unsold inventory rotten. They have weird stock .
I get them for free or less than 100$. I preinstall them with FreeBSD and then we donate them to orphanage, poor people in villages or old people.
2GB RAM and 64GB Disk is good for watching youtube and reading digital newspaper and play basic games.
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@guenther No.
The stores are all over Morocco , One contact got me access to another....
They have unsold inventory rotten. They have weird stock .
I get them for free or less than 100$. I preinstall them with FreeBSD and then we donate them to orphanage, poor people in villages or old people.
2GB RAM and 64GB Disk is good for watching youtube and reading digital newspaper and play basic games.
@guenther another
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@guenther another
@guenther An another , you can see them stacked on top of each other.
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Now let me tell you about the 87th commit.
It was about FireWire.
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/e7efe2f059a474f8f8e14393713071761a633e65
Most people think FireWire died when USB became famous. It didnt.
Its still used by professional audio interfaces, DV camcorders, industrial and scientific cameras, and plenty of legacy equipment that continues to do its job every day. Audio equipment don't need upgrades if they are still operating correctly. A firewire cable is superior to a new USB cable.
That where i tested it. The users just kept using old version of MacOS that don't even have updated SSH.
Together with Adrian Chadd, we dusted off the stack, rediscovered how it worked, cleaned it up, and refactored years of accumulated code.
And we didnt stop there.
We also added three new drivers:
• fwcam - Firewire webcams
• fwisound - Apple FireWire audio interfaces.
• fwdv - DV camcorders, including many classic Sony, Canon, Panasonic, and JVC models.That means #FreeBSD can now talk directly to equipment that many operating systems have quietly abandoned.
Someone in reddit used it to dump 50 tapes of childhood to digital format. I used it to have a zoom call with FreeBSD wifi group.
@seuros I still have some firewire devices gathering dust in the closet. free to good home (though shipping may be an issue if you're not in the US).
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@seuros I still have some firewire devices gathering dust in the closet. free to good home (though shipping may be an issue if you're not in the US).
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Now let me tell you about the 87th commit.
It was about FireWire.
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/e7efe2f059a474f8f8e14393713071761a633e65
Most people think FireWire died when USB became famous. It didnt.
Its still used by professional audio interfaces, DV camcorders, industrial and scientific cameras, and plenty of legacy equipment that continues to do its job every day. Audio equipment don't need upgrades if they are still operating correctly. A firewire cable is superior to a new USB cable.
That where i tested it. The users just kept using old version of MacOS that don't even have updated SSH.
Together with Adrian Chadd, we dusted off the stack, rediscovered how it worked, cleaned it up, and refactored years of accumulated code.
And we didnt stop there.
We also added three new drivers:
• fwcam - Firewire webcams
• fwisound - Apple FireWire audio interfaces.
• fwdv - DV camcorders, including many classic Sony, Canon, Panasonic, and JVC models.That means #FreeBSD can now talk directly to equipment that many operating systems have quietly abandoned.
Someone in reddit used it to dump 50 tapes of childhood to digital format. I used it to have a zoom call with FreeBSD wifi group.
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One year ago, AWS deleted my 10-year account over a disputed $100 bill. That day I learned something uncomfortable: unless you are a customer capable of causing a PR disaster, your monthly bill doesn’t buy much leverage.
That same week I noticed something else.
Vendor lock-in isnt just a cloud problem. Its a hardware problem too.
Here in Tangier (Morocco), there are warehouses filled with computers that Europe has already written off. Machines with 2-8 GB of RAM and 64-256 GB SSDs, sold by the pallet for almost nothing after being discarded by companies upgrading their fleets.
The hardware wasnt broken. The software had simply moved on.
The OS kept nagging users to upgrade, only to tell them afterward that their computer was too old to run the upgrade.
That is software gaslighting hardware into becoming e-waste. LOL.
So I started buying them.
In the past months I have bought over 5,000 discarded computers, not to build a datacenter, but to understand them, resurrect them, and eventually donate many of them.
That project became ChaosBSD.
In just six months, ChaosBSD has landed 87 upstream commits (it is not a AI number, lol). Ironically, after I started buying old hardware, the prices of SSDs and RAM even DDR2 went through the roof.
Drivers are unlike almost every other subsystem. Frameworks get rewritten. Filesystems get replaced. APIs evolve. But silicon doesn’t get updates. A driver is either correct, incomplete, or it never gets merged. Once it is upstream, it often stays there for decades. I updated drivers that were not touched for 24 years.
Losing my AWS account taught me not to trust a single cloud provider.
ChaosBSD was my answer to the same problem in hardware.
The project was never just about my machines. The drivers went upstream, so every FreeBSD user benefits from them.
If you have an Intel Apple computer, you can install FreeBSD 16 or DragonFlyBSD on it. The computer will feel snappier than it original OS.
I wish that hardware would find itself in secondary market
-
One year ago, AWS deleted my 10-year account over a disputed $100 bill. That day I learned something uncomfortable: unless you are a customer capable of causing a PR disaster, your monthly bill doesn’t buy much leverage.
That same week I noticed something else.
Vendor lock-in isnt just a cloud problem. Its a hardware problem too.
Here in Tangier (Morocco), there are warehouses filled with computers that Europe has already written off. Machines with 2-8 GB of RAM and 64-256 GB SSDs, sold by the pallet for almost nothing after being discarded by companies upgrading their fleets.
The hardware wasnt broken. The software had simply moved on.
The OS kept nagging users to upgrade, only to tell them afterward that their computer was too old to run the upgrade.
That is software gaslighting hardware into becoming e-waste. LOL.
So I started buying them.
In the past months I have bought over 5,000 discarded computers, not to build a datacenter, but to understand them, resurrect them, and eventually donate many of them.
That project became ChaosBSD.
In just six months, ChaosBSD has landed 87 upstream commits (it is not a AI number, lol). Ironically, after I started buying old hardware, the prices of SSDs and RAM even DDR2 went through the roof.
Drivers are unlike almost every other subsystem. Frameworks get rewritten. Filesystems get replaced. APIs evolve. But silicon doesn’t get updates. A driver is either correct, incomplete, or it never gets merged. Once it is upstream, it often stays there for decades. I updated drivers that were not touched for 24 years.
Losing my AWS account taught me not to trust a single cloud provider.
ChaosBSD was my answer to the same problem in hardware.
The project was never just about my machines. The drivers went upstream, so every FreeBSD user benefits from them.
If you have an Intel Apple computer, you can install FreeBSD 16 or DragonFlyBSD on it. The computer will feel snappier than it original OS.
@seuros Thank you for giving old hardware new life. It drives me crazy when people describe old machines as garbage just because Apple or MS won't support newer OS versions on them. These machines are plenty powerful for that vast majority of computer users.
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P pelle@veganism.social shared this topic
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@seuros Thank you for giving old hardware new life. It drives me crazy when people describe old machines as garbage just because Apple or MS won't support newer OS versions on them. These machines are plenty powerful for that vast majority of computer users.
@rbender The garbage is the software.
You’re probably reading this on a machine with more computing power than all of humanity had in 1950.
or on a phone that is more powerful than all the computers that took humanity to the Moon.
️ 
)
