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.

Comments

Cowardly GPL apologists

[mi]

It was the right idea at the time. What you describe is precisely what was happening in the 1980s.

Bullshit. BSD existed since 1970-ies. Stallman — himself paid by the captive taxpayers — was motivated by the same disdain for profit cited above.

its sole target was to avoid just that duplication. For achieving this, I applaud GNU, no question.

This reminds of labor unions claiming credit for us not working on weekends... Bullshit, in other words.

But only because there always is an implied threat that such BSD/MIT projects can re-license to GPL. It keeps the industry at bay.

There we go — just can't contain your dislike of "industry", can you? Must threaten it... But you are factually wrong here too — development of X11, under MIT/X Consortium license, dates from 1983-84, whereas the very first GPL was published only 5 years later in 1989. Thus, any talk of GPL scaring KKKorporations into cooperating with freer licenses is just more bullshit.

There is no need for the "implied GPL threat" — any abuse, real or perceived — can always result in a fork of a project, as happened to OpenOffice/LibreOffice and XFree86/Xorg to cite two.

An enthusiast programmer spends hours/days/weeks on coding something because he likes it. Encouraging him to close the result with GPL is — and always was — destructive and limiting. It was a bad idea, which even according to you has outlived its alleged usefulness by about 20 years. Good riddance.