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Why We Need Free Digital Hardware Designs
jrepin writes Free software is a matter of freedom, not price; broadly speaking, it means that users are free to use the software and to copy and redistribute the software, with or without changes. Applying the same concept directly to hardware, free hardware means hardware that you are free to use and to copy and redistribute with or without changes. But, since there are no copiers for hardware, is the concept of free hardware even possible? The concept we really need is that of a free hardware design. That's simple: it means a design that permits users to use the design (i.e., fabricate hardware from it) and to copy and redistribute it, with or without changes. The design must provide the same four freedoms that define free software. Then "free hardware" means hardware with an available free design.
I copy all kinds of designs with ASICs. It's like the Wild Wild West of hardware.
Making something free turns it into shit quality. Look at music for a great example. I've never really thought that software should be free, because it cheapens what I do and makes my field pay less. It seems like it's easy to make it free because it's easy to copy. Hardware is not the same. no one is going to even give away the raw materials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware
Open-source hardware (OSH) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) as well as open-source hardware is created by this open-source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. It is sometimes, thus, referred to as FOSH (free and open source hardware). The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned so that others can make it - coupling it closely to the maker movement. Hardware design (i.e. mechanical drawings, schematics, bills of material, PCB layout data, HDL source code and integrated circuit layout data), in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released under free/libre terms. The original sharer gains feedback and potentially improvements on the design from the FOSH community. There is now significant evidence that such sharing creates enormous economic value.
There is no real need for open source hardware. Which has been long been discussed in the long standing and thriving Open Source Hardware community. Hardware has no copyright protection or trademark assertions if you do not copy any 'art' included with the board. Copying does not take too long as reverse engineering for even complex boards can take only a week at most. Firmware and software have copyrights, so any derivative work of hardware no matter how close is not protected. Not there are plenty of people involved in openly sharing hardware whether its officially OSH (there is a foundation and everything) or not.
Just because there are idiots that do no research at Wired, does not mean it is news.
Is there some new point to this?
But, since there are no copiers for hardware, is the concept of free hardware even possible?
Someone is confused.
3D printers aside (because they're not replicators, nor will they be for a while yet), we don't share free software by copying the binaries and passing them around (well, free as in beer, maybe), we provide the instructions for building the software, i.e., the source code, build scripts, etc.
Free hardware is the same. Plenty of free hardware out there. Not free is in beer, but you can get the circuit diagrams, PC board templates, pick lists, CAD files, etc, etc for no charge and free to redistribute. Look at how many Arduino clones (and forks) are out there, or variations on the rip-rap 3D printer.
Imagine being able to print an open source clone of a current gen processor or memory. I am sure that 3d printing will make it there one day. The other 3d printer I want to see is the one that lays down a weld bead instead of plastic. Printing out of metal would be awesome. Add a computer milling machine and there is little you couldn't produce. The benchmark is the 3d printer that prints 3d printers chips, motors, and all.
You can't be serious. Of COURSE there will be a "free hardware" movement. It's already beginning to happen...
Hm... well, I got myself all het-up to rant, but seem to have blown it in the first line of text. That pretty much covers it.
G'night...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
OSHW has a bit of a difficulty associated with it, and that's the tools used to view/edit the designs. Many proprietary PCB CAD packages are offered in free-as-in-beer versions for boards up to a certain size or pin count, but then you're locked into that package. If you want to take that design and expand it beyond those constraints then you're stuck buying into the next step up of the software, or you have to fully re-design (schematic capture and layout) in another tool. Fortunately KiCAD (http://www.kicad-pcb.org/) seems to be picking up a bit of steam, but for those already using other tools, unless they're deep believers in the full open toolchain philosophy, what incentive do they have to switch packages (and re-implement their existing designs in that new package)?
While we're at it, why not have free everything: software, hardware, food, water, healthcare, entertainment, clothes, shoes, heat, cars, fuel.
It has been in existence since at least 2004, if not mistaken ...
http://opencores.org/
As a hardware engineer who gets paid for it, I don't worry a second about anyone using Eagle (or better tools) destroying my value. If I had a dollar for every person who created some schematics that, even if they were correct (and usually they aren't close), totally didn't understand layout and manufacturing and made a huge mess, I could retire.
Before you can start to talk about open source electronics hardware, you have to talk about what kind of manufacturer you want to target. Some dude with a 3d printer is the wrong answer, even if his 3d printer could do PCBs (which I am sure will happen one day, and I'm excited about). One thing you learn real quick on the job, is that you will be limited by manufacturing capability, and you will do a lot of things to get around it or to live within it.
The one thing the world will learn from this experiment, should it be performed, is exactly how much time and energy goes in to a proper design even if the schematics don't change a bit.
I think many people are severely overpaid.
There is no reason Software Engineers should be making for than 50k a year.
All professions should be starting out at minimum wage**, and go from there to a sensible, and non-greedy maximum for your location.
THere should be an overarching downward drive on employment-based income; and more functionally put towards lowering housing and food costs for everyone. That way, everyone will then be bale to hold a job that enjoy and want to do, rather than choose one based on earnings potential. If earnings potential were levelled out and made even for every industry, there'd be no reason to not chase your dreams. And yes, there are people who enjoy sanitation work, or figuring out optimised solutions to problems otherwise not given a second thought, because minimum wage is too low to live off of.
Minimum wage really should be up towards $20/hr.
And highly paid industries need to have their gross compensation chopped aggressively.
Check out upverter.com, its a bit like github for hardware - they've got 32,000 open source hardware designs that you can fork, edit, download, or order all accessible online and all for free.
Manufacturing constraints are a big one. There are a number of other big ones people rarely take into account. Things like ESD protection, robustness over a wide temperature range, parts going obsolete, emissions and susceptibility, regulatory requirements. I spend a huge chunk of my time dealing with these kinds of concerns and I am mostly on the software side of aisle.
Because a) hardware engineers don't need jobs
So we shouldn't try to make Free hardware because it might put someone out of a job?
As Austerity Empowers says, these engineers aren't a charity-case.
any idiot with a copy of Eagle is a board design expert.
No-one's saying it's easy to design a CPU competitive with Intel's latest, but working Free and Open CPU designs already exist.
Absolutely, I had a sentence that I chopped out that was something like 8:4:1 Test:Layout:schematics. ESD & environment are a big part of test and a large part of layout. But it's frequently hard to express these topics to non-HW engineers, it sounds like black magic or mysterious bugs.
ESD has the whole topic of "latent defects", a device shocked but still works and ends up with a radically reduced lifetime that will often be blamed on the user.
working Free and Open CPU designs already exist.
Now we just need 5x5 mm programmable devices with SRAM, Flash, ADC/DAC, that can run off a single voltage, and cost less than a dollar.
Of course the free hardware movement isn't about actual physical devices. Free software isn't about being able to share the compiled code. It's about enabling the sharing of the designs in a specific enough way as to produce the final product; it's sharing the software in source code form. The hardware version would be about the same thing: specs, plans, and designs being open and unencumbered.
They don't support the major FOSS design tools like KiCAD and gEDA, and they invented their own closed source PCB tool which is web-only and could disappear at any time. Putting your open design at the mercy of a proprietary website would be extremely foolish.
Upverter's claim to be like Github but for hardware is false. They would be like Github if Github were not based around the open source Git SCM but had invented their own proprietary SCM instead. In those circumstances Github would have died. There's a moral there.
Upverter should be avoided by the OSHW community.
Stallman has belated become aware of "open source hardware", and has written an article to explain why all things "open source" are ideologically impure, and must be replaced by "free" (as in "libre"). So we must have "free hardware".
(This is in response to all the posts explaining that we already have open source hardware.)
Check out the Caltrans Type 170 traffic controller. It was an open hardware AND software design, published by the FHWA to cover liability. The software was called Q5. The 170 is now the most common electronic controller in the world, because from the late 70's on, its design was freely available for any vendor to build to and sell to the State of CA. It's now used all over the world because it is very inexpensive and the control software very robust (for an 8-bit controller).
I suppose it is well-nigh impossible to ever 3D print semi-conductors, but I hope someone is at least researching the concept.
I think printing your own guaranteed backdoor-free hardware would be a far more important blow for freedom than 3D printing yet another killing machine.