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- Matt2k, on 10/12/2007, -6/+43> Hardware is a physical object, and if you have a pile of computers, for each computer you remove from the pile, there is one less inside. The source IS LIMITED.
Did you bother to actually read either the article or the person you replied to? Because you're off past left field and in the parking lot across the street. Whiff. Right over your head, pal. - silverlokk, on 10/12/2007, -4/+32"Free" as in freedom of course. While I believe in the concept of a community-driven initiative, I don't know if the effort is worth it. What might instead be more feasible is the major Free Software companies getting together and coming up with a real hardware design, then contracting an OEM for manufacturing. The design would of course incorporate the devices whose manufacturers have Free drivers. The group would also have to come up with a marketing plan, or even a hardware company which each participating Free Software company owns in part.
Thoughts? - Matt2k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18I'll bet you $5 chip designs are stored in a file that can be easily copied. Didn't ANYONE read the article? They're talking about *OPEN SOURCE SPECS*
- Yorn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17Freedom, not free beer. The hardware wouldn't be given away (expcept maybe to charities) it'd be designed with the specifications free, anyone could create the exact same thing and wouldn't have to worry about patenting it, because (I assume) "prior work" would apply for the previous models and you could only patent what you actually did.
Unfortunately, this already pretty much happens. New hardware devices are reverse-engineered daily, it's just that the specifications aren't always shared openly between hardware manufacturers.
I think something like this could work, but it'd have to happen in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, not the US. We're a service economy. - chieffy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16FREE AS IN FREEDOM PEOPLE... No hidden specs. All open source. That is what the article is talking about. You'd think with all the talk about free software on digg people would be starting to understand that it's not about price but freedom.
- AKAImBatman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Um? Hello?
http://www.opencores.org/
Hobbyists have been making open hardware for quite a long time now. In particular, it's been taking off in the embedded space where bleeding edge performance and backward compatibility are not as much of an issue. - Matt2k, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14In my opinion, this is:
1) Already being done on smaller multipurpose controllers
2) Completely impractical as a replacement for a contemporary desktop CPU. Entire squadrons of paid engineers at AMD and Intel labor for years to get these beasts working. A few volunteers chipping in is unlikely to achieve anything remotely close
3) People on a blog can post whatever inane thing they feel like and have the world as an audience stroking their chins going "Hmmmm" - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Free hardware? Absolutely. As in designers providing schematic, bill of materials, PC board layout source and gerber files, assembly information etc. Free for non-commercial use. I think it's coming. I am about 1/3 completed doing this on a ham radio transceiver design.
It's going to happen with many types of products. Only a matter of time before it is not just for basement experimenters..... I hope - Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8may wanna consider re-reading the article....
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"The Open camp, perversely, has surrounded themselves with a fence that says, "Closed camp stay out!" They will only integrate their software with hardware that is Open. On the other hand, the Open camp can take the moral high road and point out that they won't sacrifice their values for a buck. And there is something to be said for that."
The "Open" camp exists outside of the GPL, please don't confuse the two as being ideologically equal. Open Source includes a wide volume of materials licensed as BSD or more-or-less Free (such as the Apache license). The BSD camp says "Hey, whatever you want man, just give us some credit and don't come to us when it explodes", for example. Personally, I have a very hard time buying into all of the values of the GPL, but I often license my own code under the BSD license. - AKAImBatman, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6"Until someone creates a replication machine, no."
How about an FPGA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA
Long story short, it's a "soft" microchip that can be loaded with any design that will fit in the available circuitry and pin count. If you've got a $150 to blow on the hobby, you can get a wonderful development kit from here:
http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xebiz/designResources/ip_product_details.jsp?key=HW-SPAR3E-SK-US&sGlobalNavPick=PRODUCTS&sSecondaryNavPick=BOARDS)and
FPGAs are not a perfect solution to all the world's ills, but they are now powerful enough to deploy directly rather than contracting for an ASIC run. - chieffy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The meanings of hundreds of words have changed over the years to mean things that are almost entirely different from the original meaning. Why can't the word "free" be more readily interpreted as free as in freedom when seen in conjunction with the word "software" or with the word "hardware"?
- ElectricSoup, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4This has nothing to do with costliness.
The guy isn't talking about hardware that's "free" as in a giveaway, no money asked. He's talking about hardware whose specifications are "free"-ly available. His argument is that part of the reason that Mac OS X runs so smoothly is that Apple only need write software for a limited range of hardware the specs of which are fully known to them.
For myself I think alternative OSes won't take off until they come pre-installed on boxes - and this for a number of reasons. But one is that the software is guaranteed to work on that hardware - because an OEM won't ship unless it does, since it has an interest in not being deluged with support calls.
Microsoft knows this. This is why it leaned very, very hard on OEMs who wanted to ship boxes with BeOS on. That killed BeOs dead. Microsoft is doing the same with OEMs that want to ship Linux right now.
The article is right. An alternative OS isn't going to gain traction until it ships on hardware and is known to work pretty infallibly on that hardware. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Sure it's possible: Chumby, for example, is a Linux Computer that is Open Source from the ground floor to the floor-before-the-top (Flash user inferface keeps it from claiming that it is _completely_ open, however, you're not compelled to use said interface except for the fact it ships with it by default). It wasn't very costly to develop (you can use Free tools to design the logic board, Freescale is very upfront about how to interface with their chips, and the MX21 is a dream to build a system around), kits for the processor range from the $500-$2000 range (which is as much as a decent laptop, if you want to talk comparatively).
The only problem is, convincing people to buy into any new platform. People can spin these platforms in a year, or six months. But, without millions of dollars in marketing or a real grass-roots effort, they're dead in the water. The Free Computer age is alive and well, and we're completely ready, it's the users who have to take the next step, and demand that companies stop locking them out of the loop. - anvilon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Matt2k,
"Didn't ANYONE read the article?..."
You must be new here... - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"Completely impractical as a replacement for a contemporary desktop CPU. Entire squadrons of paid engineers at AMD and Intel labor for years to get these beasts working. A few volunteers chipping in is unlikely to achieve anything remotely close"
Most of the work done at Intel and AMD is a process called "Validation".
Validation means "Making sure our product will work, under a set of conditions that are well defined and can be reproduced". VHDL and Verilog code is ran through validation tests by hundreds of employees, continuously looking for logic that can be simplified, dead code that can be removed or optimized and made better, and only after exhaustively testing the code can it be released to manufacturing. This is because their hardware is _silicon_; once they've made it, they've got very little ability to remake it (except for some electronic fuses and some vague micro-programming done with on-board EEPROMs).
Our Free devices would be FGPAs. Big ones, but still FPGAs. They're slower than traditional CPUs most of the time, but can be accelerated many times with external co-processors (of which the design of can be a Free chip made into silicon after it's gone through hours and hours of exhaustive testing, cores such as the OpenSPARC T1). They would allow us to dynamically recompile our computers on boot. This completely invalidates your point. - Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5The people who are saying "no, because we have limited material resources" completely missed the point of this article.....
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Open source hardware on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_hardware - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Ah. Thanks for clearing that up guys. My bad.
- LiquidPenguin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Tried to add this in in time, but I ran out of it.
To be fair, I should mention that OSH does have many distinct advantages. For instance, the same risk I take in slow patching also exists with closed hardware. But OSH takes the advantage in having a much longer support cycle. Someone, somewhere will have the same hardware and will continue to write patches long after the "company" loses interest. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4i approve. open specs get technology forward.
- roosterjm2k2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5#-- 2 posts happened since i started this, so take it as such
Matt, thats why he said "free as in freedom"
It could never be "free as in beer" for the reasons you stated...
The point would be open-source firmware and drivers in all devices...
The problem is...ideology and philosophy have no place in a machine. Nobody is going to invest in making hardware, then opening it up for others to do better. Open source software is due largely in part to private people working in their free time (though some is commercial) ... hardware would require large amounts of professionals working in a commercial setting, with that much effort, it would certainly be a for-profit company and therefore need to be competitive...closed source is looked at as a competitive edge in todays world.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for open-ended hardware....i think it could do wonders, but im also realistic...in a Utopian star-trek like society where money and wealth and class separation no longer exist, it would happen...but not in a capitalist financial-driven society. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4"Free software users don't have enough bulk need to justify a bulk shipment of parts."
Might want to revise that statement. The majority of the Internet runs on a Free platform of some kind, including many portions of the code existent inside of Windows and other closed operating systems. In fact, many hardware designs also include open source as a part of their functionality; this is so much the case that Linux is quickly overtaking many proprietary embedded operating systems in becoming the most prevalent OS for embedded devices. The only place where Linux hasn't made a huge impact as of yet is the Desktop. The users are there. The demand from those users that the device be Open isn't.. yet. - chieffy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+67of7: What pile of crap are you referring to? Are you saying Linux is a pile of crap? If so you are flame bait.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The idea isn't to produce it for /free/, as in give the things away, it's to make them transparently; you can see all of the components, and if you're willing to go through the trouble, purchase them all separately and cobble your own together. This insures you can use every feature of the item available, and know exactly what went into making it (you can do it yourself).
The only problem with this concept is that most people don't really care how it's made; they're consumers, they want to consume. But for the few that it does actually matter to, it's huge, and often a deal-breaker on buying hardware. Imagine buying a WiFi card that, not only do you know how it works, but you have the VHDL code for how it works shipped with the product. If there's a new feature that's available, it's as easy as downloading the code, compiling it for your WiFi card, and uploading it. And this is _hardware_, not software. Such a device, however, would likely never conform to FCC rules as tight as they are on the subject of 2.4GHz, and thusly could never be mass-produced and sold as anything more than test equipment.
So, I agree that it's a great idea, but I find the practicalities of its implementation are too few to make it viable. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I would certainly pay if the alternative was a DRM locked down machine. I might pay anyway if it was small and had lots of io ports and was easy to get a replacement for.
- ricree, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4@Matt2k
The problem is, open source is ambiguous as well. Free software implies some level of rights to modify and distribute the software freely, whereas "open" really just means that the source is available to look at. Unfortunately, neither term really captures the full meaning of the movement, but if you could come up with one that totally removes the ambiguity, it would certainly be helpful. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Hasn't gone anywhere? You'd still have to buy Free hardware, you just would be able to do whatever you want with it after you owned it, including redesign it, get contracts with manufacturers and sell better versions of it yourself.
The idea is Freedom of Design, not Freedom of Components; the process of designing and building an item are just as easy to make Free as the coding of software. It's just the hardware implementation you'd pay for. - Doriath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You gotta admit it's a good thread for digging down.
Many of the comments in this thread are from people who not only failed to read the article, but also think that words in English have one and only one meaning each. - Zephyrspecial, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3This would be like the Volkswagen Beetle of computers. In the 60's, the US carmakers were always coming out with the latest flashy thing, while VW kept cranking out Beetles that were similar to the previous year's model, with improvement that could usually be retrofitted to previous models. This is much like laptops today - new models come out each year, and the "old" models are put on clearance, even if the specs are similar. A lot of money is spent designing, marketing, and packaging "new" models that don't have any new technology. An open source hardware design that is constantly improving and building on the previous model's sucess, rather than being redesigned from the ground up to be "flashy", would likely turn out, in the long run, to be of a higher quality and lower cost than the flashy redesigns. It would also last much longer, because it wouldn't be orphaned the very next year. Ever tried to find a battery for a 3 year old laptop? It can be cheaper and it's definately easier to buy a new laptop!
As an open standard, any manufacturer could make it. They would save the cost of designing it, and the competition would keep the prices down once there is much of a market. It would probably have to be special-ordered at first, but the open-source community is huge, so I'm sure there would be enough pre-orders to make it happen. - lordsandwich, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Whether he knows it or not, the author isn't really proposing an open hardware community; he wants a foundation that designs a unified standard for hardware configurations to achieve the same "Just Works" advantage that Apple has with its own computers. Doesn't matter whether the hardware specs are open or proprietary.
Provided you could get at least one PC manufacturer onboard, it wouldn't be too hard for a body like the OSDL to draft a "Made for Linux" spec. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Since when could you boot up C++ at all. C++ isn't even a process forget an OS.
- pozzoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Mark:
2) Completely impractical as a replacement for a contemporary desktop CPU. Entire squadrons of paid engineers at AMD and Intel labor for years to get these beasts working. A few volunteers chipping in is unlikely to achieve anything remotely close
Doesn't that apply against Opens Source software? One of the common arguments I hear against OS soft is just that, - LiquidPenguin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The real problem isn't exactly getting a complete Open Source hardware manufacturing process going. With enough capital, your average shmoe could start one up. The real problem is getting enough demand for OSH and staying competitive at the same time.
To all those people who say the OSS community is large enough to support OSH, don't kid yourself. You don't speak for all of the OSS community when you say that.
If I was confronted with an nVidia GPU and an OSH GPU in equivalent performance and Linux support, other factors have to come into play. For instance, what about support? How long will the OSH GPU have support or will OSH community tell me that I would have to RTFC and write my own patches? As much as I like having the source code available to my every whim, I don't have the time to write patches for every piece of hardware in my network. What about cost? I can guarantee you that unless you can get some of the bigger 3rd party GPU manufacturers like PNY to build cards out of an OSH GPU, the cost will remain higher than most. There's also the possibility that it's specifically for Linux could drive the cost up. For instance, Amazon lists the retail of the WRT54GL for $140.99 while the WRT54GS is listed as $79.99 (oddly enough, they have a sale on both which lists them at $59.99 [less rebate] and $69.99 respectively. I'd pick a better example, but I'm short on time :P ).
It's like the old saying goes.
You can have two of the three options, fast, cheap or good.
You can have it fast and good, but it won't be cheap.
You can have it cheap and good, but it won't be fast.
You can have it fast and cheap, but it won't be good. - tenderstorm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3As far as I know, SPARC specs are FREE.
http://www.sparc.org/resource.htm
http://www.sun.com/processors/opensparc/ - einfeldt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This site is free as in beer, and is designed to help people exchange hardware for free locally:
http://www.DIYparts.org - AKAImBatman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3More to the point, the latest SPARC microchips are free:
http://www.opensparc.org
The catch-22 is that you need the services of a high-end fab to produce these chips. In addition, you'll also need someone to place and route your instance of the design as Sun (from what I understand) does not provide anything more than the source code.
Still, it should meet the needs of an "Open" laptop project. If you want an open CPU, just purchase SPARC T1s from Sun. You may not be able to realistically change your CPU, but at least you can know for sure how it works. - benplaut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@Anvilion:
you much be from slashdot... - crazybrit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I really really really really really really really really really hope something like this happens some day. It would be a great way to gain a bigger audience for OSS, which means more developers!
- dhughes, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3 OpenBIOS is here and getting better, it's not so much a physical device that you can put your hand out and receive, you just replace your BIOS with it.
An Open Source Graphics card is well underway, the OGD1 board.
None of them are free, time and effort always cost something, but at least someone is working on such a thing. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2it's about open specs, not free equipment. the title is a bit confusing since 'free' is also used in the "open source vs free software" debate, long story.
- xutopia, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Reading skills do not seem to be requirements for your job.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1lol ok ok
- Matt2k, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Agreed. The stubborn refusal to adopt a less confusion term is more of a religious battle for these guys than anything else. When every discussion about "Free" has to be footnoted with an the same tired aside about libre vs gratis, you have to wonder why they insist on using the bucket with the hole.
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Who is talking about free beer. We are talking about open specs and design, you still have to pay for the actual chip.
Once again we have the morons who don't realise that free software is nothing to do with cost. Free as in beer is a mere side effect that happens to be useful to many. - Jumangi, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3I just don't see the need for it. The open source world isn't being held back because there isn't a comparable open source movement in hardware.
Also even if your just talking open specs the investment in new hardware designs(just the designs not the actual production) is far more than most software. Thats why there are far more software companies out there than their are hardware ones.
The world of PC software and hardware are two very different things. - 15charmaxwtf, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2read the article :p
- pickypg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You would divide the community and create issues by focusing that community on only the open hardware. There's such a huge amount of hardware that is not free, that not only would this be a problem, but it would be probably the nail in the coffin for a lot of open source initiatives (not Linux or BSD though, since they would just either have a fork to work on the open hardware, or just build in support, which could be done along side the normal hardware).
- arobicha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I could have sworn we already had free hardware... I've seen plenty of circuit diagrams to cool inventions on the web for free... Doesn't that qualify as free hardware distribution? I mean, since you're able to purchase the components necessary to make anything you find on the web, and most people are more than able to get a circuit diagram to any computing combination their heart desires (as well as specially ordered parts if you're cunning enough to design them), so I'd say we're pretty much there... The thing is that hardware design isn't the same as software design, and it requires a different mindset to properly make good hardware. (by different of course I mean that of an electronic engineer, who in general are odd people...)
So do whatever you need to do, but in reality software has a lot more potential than hardware... Making hardware is so much more of a pain that progamming, and making the proper microchips is even more expensive... "free" is a misnomer, you're always free to develop whatever you want... Most people just don't have the know how to do it. - eighthave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The problem with this article is that it proposes that we start by building free laptops and desktops. While that would be great, I think its quite unrealistic to expect the volunteer-driven free software development style to create some a large and complex project in a short time.
Instead, I think that the free software community can start small and make a meaningful impact, while learning how to develop more complicated hardware. A good example is the Arduino project. The Arduino is the free computer that you describe in the article, albeit a very small one. It is based around a 16MHz Atmel AVR ATMEGA8 microcontroller. It only has a USB connection and a bunch of analog and digital I/O pins.
This thing has more processing power than the first computer my family owned in 1986. That one cost almost US$5000, the Arduino costs US$30. You can build one yourself for less than US$10. The whole development environment and libraries are free software, available under the GNU GPLv2 (now that Sun released Java under that license [source]
Yes, its a small start, but there are some very important lessons being learned here. First off, how to create a manufacturing and supply chain for free hardware. That’s already working, you can buy the Arduino readily in North America and Europe. More work is being done along these lines in Colombia, South Korea, and other places.
Also, just like free software is architected and built in a very different manor than proprietary software from giant companies, free hardware is developed in a very different manor than hardware designed and built by giant companies. So that means we should not be purely thinking of imitating the models we see in the proprietary hardware world. Instead we need to find which models work best for free hardware. -
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