Post #4032609

2026-07-23 09:22 UTC

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.

Replies (4)

@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-07-23 09:40

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. :)

Open ##4037050
@adrianmorales@ieji.de 2026-07-23 09:56

@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe Wow, thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for doing this. Not everyone's tech savvy. Some just go along with whatever Big Tech and Big Corpo tell them. It's not right. I'm glad people like you exist.

Open ##4257987
@gtsadmin@wiseowl.club 2026-07-23 15:54

@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe You sir are a man of Vision, and I salute you

Open ##4257988
@erraggy@hachyderm.io 2026-07-23 17:28

@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe what an awesome story with an outcome I never expected. Thanks for your contributions to these solutions!

Open ##4257989