Ask Slashdot: Is There Space For Open Hardware In Networking?

New submitter beda writes: Open hardware has got much attention with the advent of Raspberry Pi, Arduino and their respective clones. But most of the devices are focused either on tinkerers (Arduino) or most notably multimedia (Raspberry Pi). However, there is not much happening in other areas such as home routers where openness might help improve security and drive progress. Our company (non-profit) is trying to change this with Turris Omnia but we still wander if there is in fact demand for such devices. Is the market large enough and the area cool enough? Are there enough people who would value open hardware running open software even with a higher price tag? Any feedback would be most valued.

Comments

Re:false premise

[amorsen]

Raspberry Pi is a GPU with a CPU bolted on the side. The CPU is entirely dependent on the GPU, it cannot even boot without it. The GPU driver is fairly trivial; it mostly consists of stub calls to the firmware blob.

The firmware blob is proprietary and closed, to the point that it even has restrictions on which instructions the GPU is allowed to use. You can buy an unlock code to remove the restrictions. Even Android devices are not that closed down in general.