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Celebrate Hardware Freedom Day 2013
Blug_fred writes "The Digital Freedom Foundation is proud to announce the first celebration of Hardware Freedom Day on Saturday April 20th, 2013. While registration has opened about a month ago and early registrants will receive free banners, posters and swags as long as they register before Friday 15th, anyone who registers is of course welcome to celebrate the Day! So get your hackerspace into order, your team members ready and showcase your best 'Get Into Hacking workshop' to entice your neighbours to start. Still not lucky enough to be part of a hackerspace structure? Then use that day to meet people who will be willing to join you in the project!"
Will anyone remember to go?
Yeah!
Whereas Richard Stallman famously asks people not to buy him parrots as gifts, Digital Freedom Foundation president Frederic Muller mentions in his bio that he owns a cockatoo, a Alexandrine Parakeet, three iguanas and five turtles.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
We present you RuuviTracker, an open GPS tracker.
I'm a big fan of ThinkPenguin, which is one of the only companies supporting free software, but really, do I care about the freedom? Or do I care about my hardware working? Because ultimately it is the later of which nobody else seems to be able to do right. Now maybe that ties into the fact everyone else is shipping proprietary crap. I don't know. But so far none of the dozen other companies I've tried have shipped anything but poor service and hardware thats been a problem. I guess that is why System76 only ships with Ubuntu.
I'm a big fan of ThinkPenguin, which is one of the only companies supporting free software, but really, do I care about the freedom? Or do I care about my hardware working?
In some cases, these might be the same. If you don't have full control over your hardware the same way that HW manufacturers and the NDA-signing, proprietary-interface-equipped OS and SW manufacturers do, your machine can be exploited and rooted in a way that would be very difficult to remove. If you get owned like this guy, how do you clean up the mess so that you can trust your HW afterwards? (Who knows what your firmware is doing right now in your machine.)
Ezekiel 23:20
I would celebrate if I could purchase a cheap tablet computer that in the very least used replacable batteries, like any cell phone made in the past two decades uses.
I just want let people know, if you have a local community workshop or hacker space, I strongly encourage you to check it out. I am lucky to have two in my area, one of the 8 TechShops around the US and a smaller, more community driven workshop (Maker-Works).
I found both to be amazing resources as far as tools, classes and community support are concerned.
I am one of those very introverted people, I do not go out much at all socially and really avoid going out in general if I can. I am also pretty geeky, programmer, hardware hacker type.
I was amazed at how friendly, accepting, encouraging and similar to myself everyone at these two shops were. I really could not get over it. I went to one of the meetings at the local community hackerspace shop and literally felt like I was in a room full of people very very much like myself for the first time in my life (I'm 45).
I can not say enough good things about these places. I realize my experience is only at two of them, but really, even if there is a 50/50 chance one of them in your area might be as great of an environment as the two in my area, it is really worth it to go check them out.
Wax on, wax off baby!
It's just we need to change the meaning of the word "freedom" because we certainly aren't going to get this intrusive copyright/trusted computing thing to come off the track any time soon
Freedom where freedom to choose equals this EFCI mainboard or that EFCI mainboard.
Freedom to choose MPEG-LA over MPEG-LA
Freedom to use only your real name
Freedom to not have usenet
Freedom to have an ISP filtering ports
Freedom to have all your communications copied and exploited under the guise of "state secrets"
Freedom to have your videos taken down under bullshit claims
Freedom to have your GPS used to send a drone on your head.
I thought april 20 was the day you "free your mind"
Unlike 'software freedom', hardware freedom is more difficult since it would require that anything offered in silicon be offered on a reprogrammable FPGA. Or else, the user does not have the control to change how the hardware works. This 'free' hardware will inevitably be more expensive, as one would have to use FPGAs instead of ASICs, flash instead of ROM and so on. Question is - how many champions of either hardware freedom or software freedom are willing to pay more to get their free hardware? Those things are definitely not gonna be any cheaper.
Freedom, freedom, freedom, oy! Freedom, freedom, freedom, oy!
I have often found that 'hardware problems' can be solved by loading decent software. In some cases the software is working around hardware problems, in others it's just a matter of having less bugs and not causing 'hardware problems'.
You don't have to pay more, just buy AMD products. AMD has opened up their GPUs, supports coreboot and intends to use coreboot exclusively on future boards, last I checked they were even paying some devs to work on the FOSS drivers to their APUs and GPUs to help get them up to speed so that free drivers would be ready at release for their products. Hell as an added bonus not only does it not cost you more money but you can save quite a pretty penny as AMD chips have never been cheaper (especially the Thuban X6s, the bang for the buck on these $100 chips is just insane) and you can build the entire system for less than the cost of the CPU and board from the other guy.
So if you support open hardware that you control? Buy AMD and put your money where your mouth is. I put my money where my mouth is, not only has my shop been AMD exclusive for several years now but myself and my entire family is on AMD, 5 desktops and 1 each of laptops and netbooks. Performance is great, even after 3 years I still get over 4 hours on my E350 netbook and my Thuban just tears through games and video transcoding with cycles to spare.
Seeing as how you can get a full triple kit for $250 or a full 6 core kit for $300 you can eat your cake and have it too, have open hardware without putting the hurt on your wallet.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We (Elphel) are an Open Hardware company for more than 11 years, all our products are distributed exclusively under Free licenses (GNU GPL, GNU FDL, CERN OHL). And yes - customers are willing to pay extra for the freedom they get. Of course it is not an easy business, production volume rarely can go high as most application require either single are just a few units, but our products are used in most US National Labs, NASA, many universities and research centers around the world. And it is fun to develop such stuff that can be used in some innovative ways we would never think of ourselves, so we try to combine high performance with "hackability" - this is the minimal combination needed for most scientific applications. So we do not consider "Open Hardware" as some DIYish and simple stuff only (it is very important, of course, we love Arduino). And would never use "openness" as an excuse for inferior performance, would not develop "poor man's" replacements of the real proprietary stuff.