I support the work the Internet Archive has done. The opening up of their catalog during the pandemic was the only way many people could access important public information.
I love computers, and so many aspects of the digital age. But one of my biggest concerns with this era is the impermanence of information. We have seen people trying to use this impermanence to rewrite the perception of history. This is not new (Tulsa Race Massacre), but the new systems break quicker than paper and cutting people off by expiring a license or DRM key is a lot easier than physically seizing every copy of a written work.
The transition to digital threatens to completely remove our ability to archive our culture as a public good, and puts that power solely in the hands of moneyed interests. So much human effort has been put into establishing and maintaining systems for free distribution of information. We are watching it being stripped away and selectively leased back to us, and once that process is complete, it will be much more difficult to get back to where we are now.
I am not a legal expert, and I have no special insight into how the legal process has gone or could have gone.
I personally want to thank the Internet Archive for fighting to preserve our rights. I appreciate The Internet Archive standing up and taking on this fight, and if there was a better way to do it then someone should have done it.
Fights for public rights over private interest will always be uphill battles full of road blocks, and take sustained effort. I am going to donate $100 towards The Archive's continued legal battles (both defensive and offensive).
Internet Archive Forever! I hope to catch you at one of the archive events.
I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast.
When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned that most of the experience people seemed to be gaining is how to navigate the development environments. Each FPGA manufacturer has their own environment that only works for their own chips and only supports their own (or partner's) JTAG controllers. Each development environment is completely different and often a design-by-committee mess to navigate, let alone use.
So I continued like most in the direction of my first purchase and messed with Xilinx ISE. I could write pages about this tool (Doesn't support spaces in installation path, 15 gigabyte install, matlab-level licensing even for the free version, on linux first command to run before you use ISE is source settings64.sh, etc.).
Above all that, my primary issue is that while the synthesizing/place-and-route (FPGA form of compiling) work on linux, in the newer versions of ISE that no longer require broken kernel drivers, they incorrectly load libusb, so you have to LD_PRELOAD the library, and even then it only seems to correctly load a third of the time.
(shameless plug time)
I don't think anyone else should have to deal with this crap. I called BS, and started a project I (for now) call "Adapt" to make a tool that runs on all POSIX systems to be able to support all FPGA chips and all JTAG controllers with an easily-extensible code base.
Do note that this project does not synthesize or route for chips, only load the bit files onto the chips. Other work is being done on that.
I am currently working on re-implementing some JTAG controller firmware so the tool can be distributed without proprietary software, and after that I will get back to the core of the project, add testing, and finish the ability to support multiple chips.
This project is very much in progress so this is just a heads up for now. However if anyone would like to contribute support for their favorite controller or chip, it would be greatly appreciated.
It only works with a Spartan-6 LX9, and then only has partial support (e.g. no block RAM). I'd be interested in hearing about other projects like this if you're aware of them.
A few friends are working on making a generic tool that will support lots of different architectures, but since Xilinx has a clause in their agreement for downloading ISE that you will not reverse engineer the software, and that you will not use the output of the software (the bit files for example) to reverse engineer anything. This means that you can't compile a bunch of slightly different things in ISE and check what the bit files look like. The only alternative my friends can think about are rather extreme ways of getting around this.
I love computers, and so many aspects of the digital age. But one of my biggest concerns with this era is the impermanence of information. We have seen people trying to use this impermanence to rewrite the perception of history. This is not new (Tulsa Race Massacre), but the new systems break quicker than paper and cutting people off by expiring a license or DRM key is a lot easier than physically seizing every copy of a written work.
The transition to digital threatens to completely remove our ability to archive our culture as a public good, and puts that power solely in the hands of moneyed interests. So much human effort has been put into establishing and maintaining systems for free distribution of information. We are watching it being stripped away and selectively leased back to us, and once that process is complete, it will be much more difficult to get back to where we are now.
I am not a legal expert, and I have no special insight into how the legal process has gone or could have gone.
I personally want to thank the Internet Archive for fighting to preserve our rights. I appreciate The Internet Archive standing up and taking on this fight, and if there was a better way to do it then someone should have done it.
Fights for public rights over private interest will always be uphill battles full of road blocks, and take sustained effort. I am going to donate $100 towards The Archive's continued legal battles (both defensive and offensive).
Internet Archive Forever! I hope to catch you at one of the archive events.