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Live Interview: Luke Leighton of Rhombus Tech
Today we're doing a live interview from 18:30 GMT until 20:30 GMT with
long time contributor Luke Leighton of Rhombus Tech. An advocate of
Free Software, he's been round the loop that many are now also exploring:
looking for mass-volume Factories in China and ARM processor manufacturers
that are truly friendly toward Free Software (clue: there aren't any). He's currently working on the first
card for the EOMA-68
modular computer card specification based around the Allwinner A10,
helping the KDE Plasma Active Team with their upcoming
Vivaldi
Tablet, and even working to
build devices around a new embedded processor with the goal of gaining
the FSF's Hardware Endorsement. Ask him anything. (It's no secret that
he's a Slashdot reader, so expect answers from lkcl.)
yaay always wanted to do that :)
I don't think I needed anybody to tell me that one.
you might not - but there are a few people who don't know, and who want to find out for themselves. it's good that they do that, because when it all goes to shit, they're the ones who it's easiest to work with. it's not just academic for them: they now KNOW what the problem is (because they lost money or time over it)
Why should they care about Free Software? All they want to do is Charge Money, and the wishes of a bunch of free software advocates doesn't mean anything to them.
well, take a look at the allwinnertech.com web site. the community surrounding the allwinner a10 processor has grown sufficiently large that a number of community-driven entrepreneurial boards such as the cubieboard, hackberry and so on are actually listed as "Dev Boards" on allwinner's official web site.
if you recall HTC had a keyboard-based phone? techies and geeks loved it. when HTC's next phone wasn't a keyboard-based one, it absolutely tanked.
bottom line: don't underestimate the level of influence that free software people can have.
The good news is, they'll steal the free designs as readily as they steal the other ones.
Are we under the illusion there is a high-volume plant where management is thinking "gee, if we could only get some work from Free Software people, we'd be set".
it's much more fundamental than that. these are factories that in some cases quite literally make shoes, or jumpers, or... socks and handbags on the same floor or building. the owner went one day "i know i'll diversify: let me just go buy some PCB manufacturing equipment". the level of software expertise they have is LITERALLY zero. they buy ready-made designs, ready-made [GPL-violating] software images, and so on.
I like free stuff, but the religion which is Free Software seem to lose sight of the fact that the rest of the world isn't as interested as they are.
well, you need to read the articles online about how the Linux Steam/Valve Team got together with the Intel 3D Graphics Team. one of them described it as "the most productive work meeting they'd ever had".
there really *is* a business case for using free software. tie that in with the fact that many engineers buy stacks of tablets hoping to be able to buy 1,000 of them and use them as the basis for their custom products, but then they find that no, the source code isn't available, and bear in mind that geeks are some of the most influential people on forums which the average users frequent, and you start to realise that it's a bit bigger than you think.
Sadly it seems like SOC development outpaces your ability to actually put it into a platform. Is this still going to continue for the foreseeable future?
good question! this first one was always going to be the hardest. it's taken.... almost a year to eventually find all the parts and suppliers. Mid-Mount HDMI was a bitch to track down. we'll still need to do the PCMCIA casework, and so on, which will need $6k for the endplate to be modified.
once that first one is done, however, we'll not only have pre-established relationships with all the suppliers, but we'll likely already have spare stock of some of the parts, *and* have the schematics to be able to cut/paste to create the next one, and so on and so forth.
so i fully expect subsequent cards to be vaaastly quicker development time. but, even there, it depends on the level of cooperation of the SoC vendor. if they don't provide EVB schematics, we can expect the PCB development to take longer. etc. etc.
remember - this is a project which will be going for at least the next decade. we're just getting started.