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Stallman's Legacy Halts At Hardware (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: To say Richard Stallman had a profound effect on free software is not a bold enough statement. The power of the GPL, and his advocacy for software freedom have changed the world. But there is one frontier that has yet to hear this gospel. These days, no hardware is an island. Almost every type of electronics we use is running some type of code, and in almost every case some of that code is secret in more ways than one. From beefy processors to graphics controllers, boot ROMs and binary blobs run in the silicon we base our systems upon. The code is not published and in the rare case that you are able to view the source it is only under strict NDA. This represents one of the biggest barriers to true open hardware.
In the long run, the real legacy of the GPL will be that it proved that developers and users don't want lengthy, highly-restrictive licenses that claim to be "open" and claim to support "freedom".
Instead, they want concise licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses that go out of their way to promote openness and freedom for all: for developers, for users, and for those who wish to use open source code without contributing back any changes.
That's the thing about freedom that the GPL crowd just doesn't get. It's not freedom when you force somebody else to contribute back changes they made to software; it's tyranny.
True freedom is when you get to choose what you do with changes you made to open source software. If you want to contribute them back, then you can do it. If you don't want to distribute the modified source code, then you don't have to. It's real freedom at work: you choose what you want to do, without somebody else dictating anything to you.
The BSD and MIT licenses offer true freedom. The GPL offers restriction and the elimination of freedom.
When you start missing the days when every piece of hardware you bought came with schematics and firmware listings, instead of six page license agreement printed in four point fonts and written in incomprehensible legaless (and indeed, demanding adherence to reprehensible terms.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I think patents are why this can never work.
Pretty much EVERY industrial process is patented by someone. That patent is guarded by a corporation who wants to ensure they get paid ... either through sales, or licensing the patent.
IBM makes a zillion patent applications every year.
There's simply no way you can bypass the sheer quantity of "intellectual property" which encumbers the world. And since pretty much every aspect of the hardware is probably covered under a patent, you're not going to get it.
Hell, even with software, Microsoft used to insinuate that Linux violated a bunch of their patents, but wouldn't ever name them.
The modern world has been structured to serve the needs to greedy corporations. They're not going to allow you to sufficiently change the rules of the game to take that away.
Which is why every treaty these days is having the intellectual property pushed even harder, because governments are on the payroll of entities which want to further entrench their rights as superseding ours.
Keep dreaming.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Nothing is stopping you making and using your own hardware, rather than putting expectations on other peoples products. Of course, making your own hardware isnt cheap or trivial, whereas putting expectations on other people is both of those things.
The success of the GPL is in spite of Stallman not because of it.
Most successful GPL program are "Infrastructure based" Operating Systems, Web Servers (the most popular one is under the Apache Open source license) , Programming Languages, Databases. These are software that people use as the backdrop to the real work they are trying to accomplish. Installing a Database will not solve any problems, but using the database to solve your problems may improve your success. These get a lot of action because these are tools people really want, there are enough of them to keep interest, and the fact that they are not solving any real business need, means a lot of people don't have interest on keeping it for themselves. Support in an Open Source Project means that your particular needs will have a say in a larger project.
However GPL doesn't have too much in end use applications because they are solving rather narrow solutions. So they will not get a lot of support because their solution is very narrow. This means if someone is going to spend a lot of time/money working on a solution they will need to sell the software for money.
The problem with Hardware manufactures is that they make money off their hardware. There code is specialized for their hardware. So they are not so willing to let it go.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How was it a "right" idea? The society — and generations of programmers — were spending considerable efforts on software, which could not be used by all. This caused a substantial duplication of efforts and repulsed a substantial body of programmers, who preferred the truly free BSD-license instead. Instead of cooperating, people and groups ended up competing. And when the original GPL proved to not be "enough" — for example, it was still possible to use GPL2-licensed gcc in a BSD-project, Stallman doubled down with GPL3, forcing FreeBSD, for example, to switch from gcc to BSD-licensed clang.
Yep, these denunciations of "profit" is the very core of the problem. Generations of young idiots do not realize, that profit is simply a reward for doing something people want. There is nothing wrong or shameful about it and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
From beefy processors to graphics controllers, boot ROMs and binary blobs run in the silicon we base our systems upon. The code is not published and in the rare case that you are able to view the source it is only under strict NDA. This represents one of the biggest barriers to true open hardware.
this is incorrect! the giant barrier that prevents people from having true open hardware is the obscene cost of having your design made into a silicon chip. if you could suddenly get a one-off chip made for $100, we would all be running much different systems and few of them would be related to x86.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You'll never get there because you need 99.9999999% purity and precisely balanced climate controls to do cutting-edge semiconductor fabbing. Government regulation has nothing to do with it. You can't build semiconductors of modern quality or capability in a bedroom, any more than Chinese peasants could build backyard steel furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
I respect what Stallman has contributed to free software, but at the same time, his views are ridiculous. He is to FLOSS what fundamentalists are to religion. His untenable ideals and overwrought goals drive people away, and do more to hurt the more reasonable open source options than to help free software.
What is being discussed is not "free" (as in "free-beer!") chunks of physical hardware, Indeed, that would be tough to do because physical objects are made of atoms - and atoms are not generally zero cost items - so they cannot be copied and distributed for free. We're talking about "free" (as in freedom) hardware that can be understood for $0 and (at some cost/difficulty) copied. The design of the hardware is free (as in beer and as in freedom) but the hardware itself is only free as in freedom.
To look at it another way - if I design and build a house - I can offer the plans for free under a GPL-like license. You can then look at my plane, improve them and you can use the plans to build yourself a house - all without without paying me a cent...but you still have to buy the bricks and pay the builder. You *do* have to pay for your own "copying". That's actually the same with software - if I want a copy of emacs, even though it's GPL'ed, I have to pay for the bandwidth and disk space to make myself a copy of it (the GPL even allows the author to charge me a reasonable amount for making that copy - which is something that almost never happens!) The distinction between copying GPL'ed emacs and copying my GPL'ed house is in the cost of copying the item (fractions of a penny versus hundreds of thousands of dollars). That's not a conceptual difference - it's just a matter of scale - and it's not even necessarily larger. I've downloaded hundreds of Gigabytes of stuff that cost me many dollars worth of disk space to store - and I've downloaded the open-hardware design for a bracket for my "lasersaur" laser cutter that cost pennies to manufacture.
The problem we're discussing with hardware that depends on "binary blobs" is in no way different from writing software that requires an external library for which you don't have source code.
The issue is whether the software library is free (as in beer) or not. If you have to link some GPL'ed program to DirectX in order to run it under Windows - the software can still usefully be GPL'ed because even though DirectX is a closed source "binary blob" - people who run Windows all have a copy of it already. So it's effectively free-as-in-beer. However, if you write your own closed-source middle-ware package and charge people $100 to license it - then creating some GPL'ed application that requires that middle-ware isn't a very constructive thing to do. Of course we'd prefer that all of the libraries we use are also GPL'ed - but that's not an absolute requirement - and it's not a particularly reasonable one out here in the "real world".
OpenHardware that requires use of a binary blob is no different from software that requires some complicated library. If the binary blob is legally copyable (free as in beer) - we can still usefully make our own copy of the hardware. But if the binary blob is either not legally copyable or requires a license fee to copy - then we're in the same situation we were in with software that needs a pay-to-license middleware library.
Viewed in this way, OpenHardware is no different at all from OpenSoftware - EXCEPT that the cost of copying it is higher because it's made of atoms instead of bits.
www.sjbaker.org
That's not a useful datum, even if it weren't anecdotal. How do you compare the "success" of GPL as evidenced by its presence in embedded devices with "success" of Mozilla license, for example, as evidenced by firefox or LibreOffice? You can't...
And if you compare the licenses by the sheer number of projects — useful and otherwise — using them, then MIT-license is the clear winner these days.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This reminds of labor unions claiming credit for us not working on weekends... Bullshit, in other words.
Sometimes I read a thread here and just spot the most amazing, untrue bullshit - like this line.
I've been in the office Monday through Saturday for the past 3 months - involuntarily. The project manager just had to send a simple email requesting additional resources when the goals on his timeline started slipping. HR and my direct boss walk over to me and tell me that I'm expected to be at work Monday through Saturday from 8am to 6pm. I don't get paid extra for the extra hours. I don't get comp time. I'm not allowed to use vacation days during crunch time. The contract I signed when I started here said nothing whatsoever about involuntary unpaid OT. My recourse is to find a new job (it's hard to interview on a Sunday) or initiate legal action which will end badly for me.
My neighbor is a UAW worker in a Ford plant. He gets Saturdays and Sundays off - except when they allow him to volunteer for weekend OT at 1.5x rate or even higher. I'm willing to bet his annual salary is higher than mine when you factor in his OT pay.
Please hop on the clue bus when it comes to unions. Please, I'm begging you.