Quote from: PatMan on August 19, 2014, 04:13:10 PM

Warnings about the hazards, risks & vulnerabilities of closed source software could be spread all over the forum to help educate the mass of noobs currently flocking to this wonderful Bitcoin world we have all created. There really is no limit as to what we can do if we pull together as we have been doing since Satoshi had a little brainwave.

Unfortunately this is borderline deluded rant, although built on the good intentions, the same that are used to pave the hell.

Miner software is just a lightweight shim around the fundamentally closed hardware of the ASIC. Perhaps the new readers need to be reminded about the timebomb that eldentyrell had placed in his FPGA miners, while keeping all the software open.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49971.0

While I generally support the goals of GPLv3 (and ckolivas in particular), the supporters need to be grounded in reality, and periodically reminded about the fact that software needs hardware to run. In particular people who claim to run "all-open-source stack" aren't doing so unless there's no HDD/SSD in their machines or they really replaced the firmware in their disks.

The really effective GPLv3 enforcement needs to rely on standardizing the interface between the software and the hardware, not on more harassment of the hardware vendors. To further this goal cgminer needs to be made more modular and clearly delineate the "mining drivers" from the "mining kernel". Baking them together is a throwback to about 1960 or so.