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To speak about open hardware, there’s a device called Milkymist One based on an FPGA with an embedded LM32 processor. It’s as open as possible and is actually used in production (as opposed to mere hacking) to create some nice video effects.

I went to their site and I see one youtube video of a two man show using it and some screen shots. That's what you call "in production"? If I send you a video of my Raspberry Pi rendering Mandelbrot patterns in front of a crowded room, will you call it "in production?" Furthermore the first thing they say on their site:

Milkymist One

The Milkymist One is an experimental hardware appliance for live video effects.

I appreciate this blog's spirit and he has some valid points (like making it more durable) but he's really overselling some of these devices. He goes so far as to suggest TI's Beagle Board and casually dismisses that it's six or seven times the cost of the Raspberry Pi's Model A. I don't even ... know where to start. I own six Raspberry Pis and one Arduino Mega 2560. They cost me roughly the same.

The LM32 _is_ a good example of open source CPU; and there's more to open source than GNU. Also, it is simply more technically appropriate here than LEON, OpenRISC and OpenSPARC. There was some confusion about the LM32 license (sparkled among other things by confidentiality notices left in the source files) but Lattice cleaned up most of the mess a few months ago. The Lattice license says: " The Provider grants to You a personal, non-exclusive right to use object code created from the Software or a Derivative Work to physically implement the design in devices such as a programmable logic devices or application specific integrated circuits." So - yes, we can implement it in non-Lattice FPGAs. There is no MMU; some people talked about building one but it did not happen. We are open to switching to OpenRISC should it become as small and fast as LM32.

I take it you've never built hardware at the "design circuit boards and get them assembled" level. It's capital intensive. For my simple projects, the difference in cost per board was about 5-10x between a run of 5 and a run of 500. Of course they're selling these, because if they sell enough, they're cheaper for everyone. If everyone had to build one from scratch, nobody would, because they'd cost about $1000 more. Looks like it's a 6 layer board. I don't think that's something you can etch in your bathroom sink with a copper clad board from your local Fry's.

And they're truly open source. It's all GPLv3 or CC BY-SA 3.0. They provide the VHDL, the board design files (and the resulting Gerbers), everything. And according to their FAQ, they're even working on a free toolchain to compile the FPGA code.

The technical overview says the system-on-a-chip is implemented with FPGAs, and the open-source component is the Verilog HDL code.

Verilog HDL code supplied by FPGA vendor

The technical overview says the system-on-a-chip is implemented with FPGAs, and the open-source component is the Verilog HDL code.

yes - and it gets _particularly_ interesting if there is a free software toolchain for Xilinx FPGAs. oh wait - there is one! http://www.milkymist.org/fpgatools/

Before bothering with that, I actually tried figuring out the license by looking at Lattice, but other than reassuring verbiage about free, I came up blank when looking for an actual license:

http://www.latticesemi.com/products/intellectualproperty/ipcores/mico32/mico32opensourcelicensing.cfm?source=sidebar

And, of course, most of the Lattice junk in the source tarball, and the documentation at the milkymist site, can't even be retrieved from Lattice itself without registering and executing some sort of license agreement:

http://www.latticesemi.com/dynamic/index.cfm?fuseaction=view_documents&sloc=01-01-08-11-48&source=sidebar

Lame. BTW, the main article links to http://www.milkymist.org/.

Which links to the SOC code page.

Before bothering with that, I actually tried figuring out the license by looking at Lattice, but other than reassuring verbiage about free, I came up blank when looking for an actual license:

http://www.latticesemi.com/products/intellectualproperty/ipcores/mico32/mico32opensourcelicensing.cfm?source=sidebar

And, of course, most of the Lattice junk in the source tarball, and the documentation at the milkymist site, can't even be retrieved from Lattice itself without registering and executing some sort of license agreement:

http://www.latticesemi.com/dynamic/index.cfm?fuseaction=view_documents&sloc=01-01-08-11-48&source=sidebar

Lame. BTW, the main article links to http://www.milkymist.org/.

Which links to the SOC code page.

Before bothering with that, I actually tried figuring out the license by looking at Lattice, but other than reassuring verbiage about free, I came up blank when looking for an actual license:

http://www.latticesemi.com/products/intellectualproperty/ipcores/mico32/mico32opensourcelicensing.cfm?source=sidebar

And, of course, most of the Lattice junk in the source tarball, and the documentation at the milkymist site, can't even be retrieved from Lattice itself without registering and executing some sort of license agreement:

http://www.latticesemi.com/dynamic/index.cfm?fuseaction=view_documents&sloc=01-01-08-11-48&source=sidebar

Lame. BTW, the main article links to http://www.milkymist.org/.

Which links to the SOC code page.