"> Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from licensing it? It’s antithetical to the whole of the company.
ARM is a proprietary ISA. To use it, you have to pay ARM money. It's literally their entire business model, I'm not sure how you could miss it."

What did I miss? Show up, pay the license, build chips. That's the business model. Are you upset about how business models work? Are you advocating all hardware ISAs be open a la RISCV? That's insane. ARM's whole model is to make money and to do so they'd welcome licensees.

"> so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be opened

Yep. It's a damn shame too, that's what everyone is saying in this thread. Apple has billions of dollars and they're letting volunteers do their work for them. It's a depressing waste of human effort, considering how Apple has the proper implementation specs available internally. It's undeniable that Asahi's development pace would be faster if they had rudimentary help from Apple engineers."

Do you have this same take on the Homebrew project and its many competitors? One could make the same argument that Apple should run their own package manager. Why allow some third party project to add value to the system by allowing end users to be able to run open source software easily on Apple hardware and software? I find this line of reasoning nonsensical.

"> Think where they could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side.

That's also a false-flag since Apple's firmware interface is undocumented. Plus it's also fairly outdated because Nvidia's GPUs have been shipping with firmware interfaces for years (since RTX 20-series). Think where they could get if they had open source kernel modules. And you can have that, on any recent Nvidia card."

Nvidia is finally working on first party open source-ish drivers. So that's a win I guess. But that's only because the IP owner -- Nvidia -- deemed it necessary to do so. I am not sure what army of Stallman-stans you command but I am not sure Nvidia or Apple or any other enterprise is going to bend to some FOSS ideal. So given that very real reality intrepid hackers like the Asahi folks took it upon themselves to reverse engineer the hardware and it has been a win for Linux/BSD enthusiasts the world over, how is this bad?

"> Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that would be closed. And yet they get shit on.

They get shit on because they're wasting their time. It's been 2 years and you still can't adjust the brightness on these machines, not because they're incapable of it but because Apple never documented the control interface for each model. Apple has this info, they just withhold it from the community because of how horribly sensitive it is. Real security issue, yunno."

Smart hackers -- again, in the truest sense of the word -- chose to spend their time doing this. In fact Hector Martin when he embarked on this asked for donations and plenty of folks are donating with their cash to fund this effort. There's clearly a market for this. It's not the fault of Martin or his friends in the Asahi world that Apple doesn't see this. And Apple may never see it. So what? The Asahi team will have brought the ability to run Linux to the M1 and increased the choice amongst Linux enthusiasts, it's a huge win.

"> I just don’t understand what people want

A Macbook with Linux on it? Preferably one that doesn't suck."

If Apple isn't going to give that to you as we just settled above (unless you want to buy a few board seats, or march on Cupterino with some sort of army...) then how else is that going to get accomplished if not by the Asahi team?

"> Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because it sucks in comparison.

And nobody ported Linux to the previous Macbooks because they also sucked. It's entirely besides the point, though."

While not 100% easy people have been running Linux on x86 Macbooks for a long time. Not sure what you're getting at here.