I made this video discussing my thoughts on the OpenPleb initiative by Wendell of Level1Techs and Steve of Gamers Nexus. As the developer of OpenRGB, the OpenPleb initiative, which aims to work with hardware vendors to open up documentation for proprietary protocols used for consumer PC hardware, could be a massive boon for OpenRGB development as at the moment almost everything we add is reverse engineered. Having access to protocol documentation would improve the quality of our code and the efficiency in which we can release it.
For reference, I’d recommend watching Steve’s original video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKOtvOqa_vM&t=0s
I posted this on /r/hardware because Steve’s video got a lot of traction there, but I wasn’t necessarily happy about posting on Reddit, so here it is for Lemmy.
It’s fascinating to think that it requires this effort to get manufacturers to agree on open standards…it’s blatantly obvious that tapping into a standardised or common ecosystem guarantees far more sucess than walled gardens. This is a simplified example, but if you are making a brand new device, say, via Kickstarter…and instead of connecting it via USB, you connect it with your own proprietary connector, that would be insane.
Yes, if you are Apple, you can pull stunts like that. And perhaps places like Razer think they can lock people into their products more, but I still think an open standard makes sense. You can add your own special stuff on top if you need to, I suppose.
(may I just add that I am one of those people who used computers when they were grey boxes and therefore RGB has never made any sense to me and Asrock’s initiative of releasing motherboards that are £100 cheaper just by leaving off RGB is huge to me!)
Impressive!
However I don’t really know how successful you guys will be at achieving this though…
Yet, I feel that every small progress there might benefit a giant part of open source hardware support as a whole.
Good luck on this, guys!
I feel like having big names like Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs will help this a lot. OpenRGB will continue regardless of whether or not this succeeds, but if they do succeed it will make OpenRGB development a lot better and easier. Steve already says he has several companies that have agreed to take part behind the scenes but nothing’s been announced officially yet.
