What oriansj (as well as rain1 and others) are doing is both very impressive and important. The objective is to get us to bootstrappability and, for example, escape Trusting-Trust attacks; one reason it's profoundly important is the long-term archival problem. <i>Media longevity</i> is one crucial part of archival, but as we were discussing today in <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20272557" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20272557</a>, there are plausible solutions to that problem.<p><i>Interpretability</i> is another part of the problem: even if we recovered an executable copy of Ivan Sutherland's historically groundbreaking program SKETCHPAD, for example, we wouldn't be able to run it because we don't know the instruction set for the computer it was built for. Remember that the entire body of knowledge about Ancient Egyptian culture was lost in the 5th Century, when the Christian Dark Age closed the temples, and not regained for almost 1400 years — and then only due to the great good fortune of the Rosetta Stone.<p>A bootstrappable computing stack is a crucial part of the "Rosetta Stone" that will be needed to preserve 21st-century knowledge. One of the few papers tackling the interpretability problem in this form is <a href="http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf</a>, "The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015", by Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay.<p>There's a more immediate necessity, though. As recent events make clear — Chrome's extension API kneecapping ad-blockers, the increasing effectiveness of Chinese censorship, and the shocking US$12 million award to Nintendo last November against ROM site operators for preserving classic video games, for example — the current political and economic system cannot be trusted to preserve our access to our cultural heritage, even during our lifetimes. That means that we need an autonomously-bootstrappable trustworthy free-software infrastructure that is viable without the massive economies of scale that fund mainstream platforms like Linux, Android, MacOS, Chrome, and even Firefox. If your personal archive of the Tank Man photo, the Arab Spring tweets, or the video of the murder of Philando Castile runs afoul of future malicious-content filters integrated into your operating system, there is no guarantee that it, or you, will survive.<p>So we're doing our best to get some green shoots established before the situation has any opportunity to get worse.