The Open Source Laptop and the Golden Age of Open Hardware

An anonymous reader writes to this short feature featuring "Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang on why he decided to build an open source laptop, how the slowing of Moore's Law is making it easier for individuals and small outfits to compete against major corporations in the computer hardware market and what hobbyist hardware makers in the U.S. could learn from China's Shanzhai, famed for their cheap clones of the iPhone and other popular handsets."

Comments

I'd love to build laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies should sell laptop shells and let us buy the parts individually, just like a desktop computer.

Shanzhai? No

[DNS-and-BIND]

What does "could learn from China's Shanzhai" mean? Shanzhai electronics is crap. No, really, it is. Does it mean "use cheap garbage components that will fail 0-6 months after sale, and close up the company so we don't have to provide refunds"? Not that China's consumer protection laws mean a damn, anyway.

The whole article stinks of "d00d this is totally kewl, we should totally make, you know, a laptop. Then add shanzhai, then add bookbinding, then add "guerrilla hardware". WTF does guerrilla hardware even mean? This has more nonsense buzzwords than the latest corporate marketing press release.