Maybe, but it seems bizarre that open source developers go so far to contribute to a closed source proprietary ecosystem when the manufacturer doesn't only make it difficult but they at times actually intentionally impede their work. That is a lot of time and effort of someone doing something for free that the manufacturer should be paying them to do and assist with.
I’m pretty sure the asahi developers themselves would totally disagree with you there. Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them. This project is no different than Linux in the old days: it’s just a piece of good hardware that kernel devs have reversed to run an alternate OS on and they’ve become quite good at it.
I don’t see people making the same statements about work on the nouveau driver or on the Broadcom opensource wifi drivers. But somehow because the hardware was built by apple folks seem to think it’s more proprietary than anything else linux has run on.
> Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them.
Didn't they make an undocumented change to the boot loader that serves literally no purpose other than to give Asahi a somewhat stable target than what they were using before?
Yeah something like that. While I’m sure they don’t like folks reversing their hardware I doubt they care to stop this if they know there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it. I think it’s more likely they become consumers of asahi Linux’ work than it is for them to actively take measures to break them.
> Apple themselves have confirmed with them they have no plans to lock their boot loader out from folks like them
No, a person who used to work on the bootloader at Apple said on Twitter they did it because they wanted to enable different OSes. That's not an "Apple confirmed", that's "employee X said".
Regardless of all the points the siblings make, first and foremost this is fun. It's fun to reverse engineer stuff. It's fun to get things working that were previously not working.
A lot of peoples careers start this way. A lot of the hacking and the cracking scene was born this way. There is a certain kind of pleasure and satisfaction involved when you get a device that was previously not designed to do a certain thing behave in that way.
I think that's not an unreasonable point, but, well:
1. I try not to tell people what to do with their free time. While you may think it's "bizarre", this use of their time has value to them, not only in the hopeful end result (fully-functional Linux on ARM Macs), but also in the satisfaction of the technical challenge, bragging rights, and general reputation. I'm sure there are some people who might look at what you do with your spare time and think you're "wasting" it sometimes. But that's in the eye of the beholder, and at any rate, that's your prerogative, as this is theirs.
2. I used to run Linux on Mac laptops (gave up around 2016 or so, tried again in 2018, gave up again shortly after), and I get the appeal: the hardware is really nice. And by all accounts, the ARM Macs are even nicer than the Intel Macs. Sure, they're not perfect (lack of upgradeability/repairability, etc.), but running Linux on them can be great, if the hardware support is there. "I like this hardware and I want to run Linux on/with it, so I'll figure it out myself" seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Many of the drivers in the Linux kernel for various bits of hardware only exist because someone adopted this attitude.
I also just think your premise is a bit flawed:
> open source developers go so far to contribute to a closed source proprietary ecosystem
This is a little bit of a weird statement, because these developers aren't doing that. The "closed source proprietary ecosystem" is macOS and its app store. The hardware itself is more or less just as open (or closed) as most non-Apple hardware. I mean, I can't rewrite the BIOS in my Framework Laptop, nor can I make heads or tails of any of the binary firmware blobs Linux loads into the WiFi chipset, graphics chipset, etc. Apple's hardware is undocumented, certainly, but that's pretty common when it comes to Linux hardware support.
> but they at times actually intentionally impede their work
Do they, though? From what I've read of the Asahi project's progress, they didn't run into cases where Apple intentionally tried to make things harder on them. Sure, some things were harder, but I don't think we can ascribe a malicious motive to Apple. The most likely explanation is that they just decided to design things in a particular way because they felt it would be best for their own purposes, and didn't really care to think about anything else.
They could have decided to actively cryptographically lock down the boot process to prohibit other OSes from running, but they didn't do that.
> That is a lot of time and effort of someone doing something for free that the manufacturer should be paying them to do and assist with.
Why "should" they? All hardware manufacturers decide what software to write, and what platforms to support. If they don't think the cost of writing and supporting drivers for Linux is worth what they'll get in return, they'll make the logical choice to just... not do that. We've seen plenty of vendors over the 30-odd-year lifetime of Linux do that math and decide Linux support wasn't worth it to them. It's a shame, but I don't think it's fair to come down on them hard for that. Certainly some vendors (nvidia comes to mind) have been actively hostile toward the Linux community at times, but I don't think we can say the same of Apple.
In fact Asahi team have argued before that Apple has actually gone to great lengths to provide documentation and tools to enable the development of third party OS kernels.
