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>Yes, we definitely want to stimulate a new movement, and put both thought and experience into it.

I'm keen. Is the current action concentrated in any one spot, or distributed around the net?

My gut feeling is that given the activity of the last couple of years the "new movement" already exists. If what already exists was focused, documented and disseminated, there would be a substantial body of work. (IMO) What is needed is a distribution mechanism/platform: an opencollector on sterioids; a Debian for hardware.

There's also the question of whether open hardware is a new movement or a progression of the free software movement, in which case we don't create a Debian for hardware, but extend Debian to include hardware.

In my opinion, the real solution is for us to start designing our own hardware.

www.opencores.org is a repository of open source hardware designs.
www.opencollector.org is another.
The Open Graphics Project is about to release real open hardware. They're focusing on graphics right now, but they have aspirations toward other kinds of hardware.

Rather than giving up control of the software just to get the hardware, take control of the hardware!

(BTW, I'm much less concerned about proprietary apps than closed-source drivers. Drivers are a major source of potential system instability. They need to be open source. Applications are isolated to their own process spaces and can't crash the system when they crash. I think a closed-source iTunes for Linux would be wonderful!)

Even if the software is free, the hardware won't ever be

It already is

I signed the petition. It asks if you would be willing to pay $100.00 for the card and it asks if you would be willing to pay $200.00 for the card.

Why did I sign the petition? I just really like the idea of a video card made especially for Linux (and BSDs). I like the idea of open hardware. I believe that in the future things like DRM will be tied more and more to hardware and it is a good idea to now start working on creating an open source alternative. There are lots of other reasons why open source hardware would be good. Some of those reasons can be found here: http://opencollector.org/Whyfree/

There is also open collector.

Maybe the same way copyright inspired copyleft, the DMCA is a form for companies to protect their products, and stop other people from profiting on those products (god forbid!), but since this really throws onto the pile, and adds hardware materials in to the copyright bin, maybe it will inspire some hardware enthousiasts to create copylefted hardware?

There's already a couple projects with exactly that in mind:

• OpenBIOS
• MyLinux PLW (Pocket Linux Workstation) (i.e., open Palm-like hardware for running Linux on, which they plan to sell for $20 above cost)
• LinuxBIOS
• The Open Hardware Certification Program
• OpenCores (for open-sourced processor designs)
• and finally a page dedicated to Writings on Open Source Hardware.

It's interesting to note that the OpenBIOS project was a recipient of funding from LinuxFund .

Yeah, it makes sense to be concerned about who is running a charity. The reason I got interested in this particular project is because Lee Felsenstein is running it.

Felsenstein's already got quite the track record:

He ran the Homebrew Computer Club, and helped kickstart the PC revolution. His framework let Woz and Jobs sharpen the ideas for the Apple in front of a community of peers. His framework for the club emphasises open architecture rather than competition between inventors, something that you still see in the PC world. Basically, he's doing for Lhaos what he and a few others managed to pull off for the United States a few decades back. Oh yeah, and I remember the folk who said that putting a computer in your home was "laughable", and he asked to "really see the benifit of [that]".

Felsenstein also invented the first cheap modem, the first portable computer, and the first community network.He wrote presciently about the "Commons of Information", years before most of us had even thought about these issues.

I reckon I owe him ten bucks in just paying my backdues for the improvements he's already given my life. If he said he was doing the same for the Invisible Underground Mole People, I'd give him the time of the day.

But he's not. He's doing it for Laotians. The guy who runs the Jhai Foundation, Lee Thorn, is an old Nam vet. In case you don't know this bit of American history, the US dropped more bombs on Laos than the Allies did on Germany and Japan combined. They're still trying to clean up the munitions and put their country back together again. Thinking about it, I probably owe them at least a buck, too.

You rant about going to black-tie events, but when somebody asks you for cash via a thirdy-party Website run out of a DSL line, you're suspicious. Too suspicious, even, to do some basic research on the implications.

Damnit, boy, that's why they do those fancy dinners. So that touchy guys like you can be reassured that this a proper "above board" appeal without you having to bother doing any original thinking. You think your local college spends money more wisely, just because it's a college? You think that the banker at your trust knows what's being done in your name? How much money do you think they wasted getting you to think this way?

Yeah, it makes sense to be concerned about who is running a charity. The reason I got interested in this particular project is because Lee Felsenstein is running it.

Felsenstein's already got quite the track record:

He ran the Homebrew Computer Club, and helped kickstart the PC revolution. His framework let Woz and Jobs sharpen the ideas for the Apple in front of a community of peers. His framework for the club emphasises open architecture rather than competition between inventors, something that you still see in the PC world. Basically, he's doing for Lhaos what he and a few others managed to pull off for the United States a few decades back. Oh yeah, and I remember the folk who said that putting a computer in your home was "laughable", and he asked to "really see the benifit of [that]".

Felsenstein also invented the first cheap modem, the first portable computer, and the first community network.He wrote presciently about the "Commons of Information", years before most of us had even thought about these issues.

I reckon I owe him ten bucks in just paying my backdues for the improvements he's already given my life. If he said he was doing the same for the Invisible Underground Mole People, I'd give him the time of the day.

But he's not. He's doing it for Laotians. The guy who runs the Jhai Foundation, Lee Thorn, is an old Nam vet. In case you don't know this bit of American history, the US dropped more bombs on Laos than the Allies did on Germany and Japan combined. They're still trying to clean up the munitions and put their country back together again. Thinking about it, I probably owe them at least a buck, too.

You rant about going to black-tie events, but when somebody asks you for cash via a thirdy-party Website run out of a DSL line, you're suspicious. Too suspicious, even, to do some basic research on the implications.

Damnit, boy, that's why they do those fancy dinners. So that touchy guys like you can be reassured that this a proper "above board" appeal without you having to bother doing any original thinking. You think your local college spends money more wisely, just because it's a college? You think that the banker at your trust knows what's being done in your name? How much money do you think they wasted getting you to think this way?

Read an interview here.
Lee was involved in getting public access terminals deployed in the early 70's in San Francisco, created the Pop 'Tronics "Penny Whistle Modem" project, and the highly collectible SOL-20 personal computer, member Honbrew Computer Club - this guy was /there/ during the genesis of the personal computer revolution.

Some of them are:
gEDA - schematic capture, board layout
Icarus Verilog - verilog simulation, synthesis
Savant - VHDL analysis, simulation (sequential and parallel)
GnuCAP - a mostly Spice compatible circuit simulator

The Open Collector has references to these projects and many more! (Full disclosure; I'm an upstream author on the SAVANT project.)

gEDA is also a good project for Linux people interested in open hardware: they develop a GNU liscenced set of hardware design tools.

Just my bookmarks two cents on the topic.

Sufficient documentation on the device must be available for a competent systems programmer to write a device driver. The documentation must cover all of the features of the device-driver interface that any user would be expected to employ. /.../

Try OpenCollector for the hardware/EDA Freshmeat equivalent...

Also checkout gEDA and opencores' mailing lists, as such projects have been mentioned there in the past.

Graham

www.opencollector.org

If open-source hardware is ever to become as widespread as open-source software it is likely going to be via the use of FPGAs.

But just as gcc helped spur open-source software, we need open-source tools for hardware design (tools for Electronic Design Automation (EDA)).

This includes schematic capture tools, hardware description language (HDL) parsers, HDL simulators, and circuit synthesis tools.

http://www.opencollector.org has a list of some open-source EDA software under development.

Once there is an infrastructure of open-source EDA tools, this will spur on the development of open-source hardware building blocks or cores (see http://www.opencores.org).

Looking forward to the day open-source hardware will have as vibrant a community as open-source software...

If you have a software project you get listed pretty easy, if your project does not fir under software or is a mixture of soft/firm/hard then make sure you get an entry into open collector

If people would like to have a domain off of mine then maybee something could be worked out. (can't do it yet as I don't host my own content, is framed out from .cx; but if a few people are interested then it could happen)

cya, Andrew...