The Need for Open Hardware 382
bwt asks: "With all the talk of DRM lately, it occurs to me that the entire concept depends on limiting the choice for computer hardware. OK, so the proper reaction to the copyright industry's attempts at PC market control is to be able to build a PC that they can't control. I know there have been some discussions on open hardware, but most if it was prior to the emergence of DRM as a real threat. In fact, Richard Stallman wrote an editorial in 1999 and said 'Because copying hardware is so hard, the question of whether we're allowed to do it is not vitally important.' DRM has perhaps changed that. Isn't the need for open hardware becoming critical? What is the status of the open hardware efforts?"
OpenPPC (Score:5, Informative)
To quote the site: "The immediate goal of the project is to enable interested parties to build inexpensive, PPC-based Linux boxes from IBM's reference plans. In the longer term, we hope to expand the open-source ideals expressed in the GPL to hardware projects, primarily motherboards."
Lots of open hardware (Score:5, Informative)
CPU cores, Ethernet MACs, complete SOC designs, etc. It's a great site, especially if you are into fpga development.
What is DRM? (Answered) (Score:1, Informative)
What is DRM?
Tue, Jan 1, 2002; by Dave Winer.
DRM stands for Digital Rights Management.
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Thought others might want to know, too. I was clueless before this post.
(ACing to avoid Karma Whore accusations.)
LGPL version of SPARC CPU (Score:5, Informative)
The European Space Agency has made available [gaisler.com] VHDL for a CPU that implements the SPARC V8 instruction set. The VHDL is available under the GNU LGPL license. Granted, implementations of LEON are slow (25 MHz?) but it's totally freely available. You may need to buy a $99 license from SPARC International to actually sell any CPUs you make, but that's pretty cheap.
The SPARC instruction set is pretty simple. I don't imagine that a similar effort for x86 CPUs would be as simple or as quick.
Simputer keeps ticking (Score:5, Informative)
A brief introduction to the simputer to those who don't already know:
"The Simputer is a low cost portable alternative to PCs, by which the benefits of IT can reach the common man. "
The system software is available under GPL, and the hardware specs under SGPL, the full licensing info is here [simputer.org].
Re:this isn't the same as creating open-software (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open hardware? (Score:4, Informative)
Which is, in my opinion, a good definition. Open specifications of hardware is needed for fair competition in the OS-market, as well as for higher quality software. Drivers based on reverse engineered specifications is obviously harder to write than if you had the specifications from the start.
Re:OpenPPC (Score:3, Informative)
Irrelevent [Was: [not] the same as...software] (Score:2, Informative)
If someone wants to know how the hardware is made in intricate detail, take it apart yourself. Information is needed to verify that it should do what it's meant to do, and enough to allow developers to develop software that can use the hardware (after all, selling something one can't use is useless, go figure.).
openhardware.net (Score:4, Informative)
" Open Hardware is engineers sharing their designs with each other through the disclosure of their schematics and software systems used on their designs. Do you remember the time when you purchased a circuit board, or computer, and the schematics came with it? I do..."
FSF is indeed concerned about this issue (Score:5, Informative)
What concerns us most is the thin layer between hardware and software: items like the BIOS and flash ROM. That layer is ripe for DRM and other technologies. That issue is quite different from Stallman's essay mentioned in the post. This isn't an issue of Free (as in freedom) hardware, but is about a matter of that "thin layer" of software where DRM will likely dwell.
FSF is currently extremely short on resources, but we hope to put at least some force behind initiatives to create Free Software in this area. In some sense, it is the last frontier for freedom on our computers. Indeed, the only proprietary software code anywhere in my computer is that which lives in the BIOS. Before now, the issue was not so strategically significant, but the fact that DRM technologies may soon live in that very BIOS makes it more significant than ever.
If anyone has an interest and reverse engineering experience, and would like involved with working on the free BIOS projects, particularly for laptop devices, please contact me [mailto]. Also, please contact me if you would like to donate to a restricted fund for this effort, as we are considering setting one up if there is substantial interest.
Sincerely,
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
SPARC (Score:4, Informative)
www.sparc.com [sparc.com]
From the SPARC site:
Open hardware, closed government. (Score:5, Informative)
Manufacturers are rightly scared of DRM for this reason. Anything too radical or obstrusive will kill sales. And what MPAA/RIAA wants is highly radical.
They are thus pursuing two avenues around the problem. The first is to make DRM a part of Windows [theregister.co.uk]. Since as we've observed most users (for a variety of reasons) are locked into Windows, they will have no choice but to (eventually) upgrade into DRM. There are some problems with this approach; they (correctly) don't trust Microsoft, either to do a good job or to look out for their interests, and there are those pesky "competitors." Will Apple play ball? Think about it. They'll have a powerful incentive not to, to try to use the Windows-DRM shock as an opportunity to gain marketshare. But of course, as has been well established in the past, Apple can be bought. That still leaves Linux. And that's a bit frightening, frankly, since you can't reliably control Linux, and the buzz on the street is that, someday, it might be what everyone uses.
That brings me to the second prong of this attack: the CBDTPA [eff.org], in its many forms, past and (undoubtedly) future. And that, basically, would make "Open Hardware" illegal. If past legislation is any guide, it would probably also make talking about how to build open hardware illegal.
So if you're considering spending time and energy getting involved in the design and (god forbid) manufacture of open hardware, please don't bother. If you're determined to contribute to the issue, you're needed in Washington.
Re:Open hardware? (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft: We would like to create a trusted computing platform. We will call it Palladium.
You: AHHHHHHH! How dare you control my computer and prevent me from running Linux!
The strength of Microsoft's operating systems are the huge amounts of software available and the ease of developing applications that are compatible across all versions of Windows. Microsoft will not restrict what software can run, they will only restrict how much damage software that you do not trust can do.
And I think it is absurd to imply that hardware manufacturers would ever restrict their hardware to only work with Microsoft. That is just bad business. Hardware manufacturers are out to make as much money as possible- not to consort with the evil empire in plans to control your content.
From everything I have read, Palladium will be a hardware feature that must be enabled by software. If the software does not enable it, thats ok. You just don't have the security features enabled.
Open Collector (Score:5, Informative)
gEDA [seul.org] is also a good project for Linux people interested in open hardware: they develop a GNU liscenced set of hardware design tools.
Just my bookmarks two cents on the topic.
Open hardware been there done that and still am (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of other archives and examples, around the web. BUT, the catch is that this information is useless to most people. Unless you have a few hundred thousands of dollars to spend to make your own IC's the only option is microprocessors, FPGAs, CPLDs, etc. The design of custom IC's is not a consumer market and never will be untill someone comes out with a neat little Star Trek replicator. The closest thing to consumer IC's is MOSIS, which will make a few chips for you for around $10,000. The UW actually has two IC fabrication labs and only a few people can (and need to) make chips with them because the lithographic masks cost $30k each.
You can make your own processors if you really want, there are plenty of books that will teach you how to make your own Verilog MIPS processor. But, the software to take that design and turn it into a chip layout costs a couple hundred thousand dollars. But, if you want to build your own Pentium class processor, you're out of luck. Those designs are the property of whoever makes them, and with good reason. It costs millions of dollars to make and design these chips (don't forget just getting your chip to work is only 1/3 of the work, manufacturing it reliably is a far greater problem). There was a case several years ago against AMD (I believe) who suddenly came out with a memory design that was smaller than the industry standard. Funny thing was that another smaller company had come out with the design several months earlier... and guess what happened? They got a hold of the chips realized AMD had copied the design EXACTLY, except for a single reversed transistor (which didn't really change anything). Needless to say AMD lost a shit load of money and had to pay royalties. So, with respect to Stallman's rather silly statement the question is important and the answer is a resounding NO.
If you want to make your own circuits though, there are plenty of resources out there pcbexpress.com [slashdot.org] will take your PCB (printed circuit board) layouts and manufacture boards for under $100. And there's even free PCB design software out there (a lot of companies have their own for their services but everyone takes GERBER files - the industry standard for PCB layout). One popular free program is EAGLE which has Linux and Windows clients http://www.cadsoft.de/ [slashdot.org], which has pretty good quality - hey its free. Plus there are lots of other PCB programs on Freshmeat. There are plenty of resources out there to make your own boards and lots of people do, but open hardware will never be as simple as downloading a design and hitting a button (even open source software isn't even that easy) because electronics isn't that simple. You can solder things together perfectly and have your design not work, because of some small detail or it could work perfectly, which is what makes it so fun!
Re:The Key to Open Hardware (Score:3, Informative)
IBM copied this model when they introduced the IBM PC in 1981, and it is largely why the PC market has been successful. However, though the PC was an open design, the clones generally aren't. All they do is maintain some base-level software compatability with the PC. You can't actually get schematics or BIOS listings for most (if not all) current PCs and motherboards. So the hardware is open in terms of bus interface, but not in any larger sense.
But when Apple decided to design and sell business computers, starting with the Apple III, the hardware was closed. Schemtics and hardware documentation were unavailable to customers. This trend continued with the Lisa and Macintosh.
At one point in the Macintosh era, Apple flirted briefly with open hardware (remember CHRP?), then went back to proprietary, undocumented hardware. Current Macintosh models are as proprietary and undocumented as ever. However, the release of Darwin source code mitigates this to some extent.
There are benefits to Apple to having closed hardware. They don't have to engineer for and test for as many different platforms and variations as Microsoft does. But this doesn't directly benefit the consumer.
To have a true open hardware platform, and the consumer benefits that would arise therefrom, we need more than just documented bus electrical specifications (e.g., PCI, AGP, USB). The actual details of the hardware design need to be public, such that a BIOS can be written as Free Software.
Note that even the microprocessor vendors are keeping secrets that impede this. For a while Intel kept the "Appendix H" documentation on the Pentium secret. More recently, it was discovered that some details of how to configure the cache of the Athlon were only available under NDA from AMD.
The whole "trusted computing" mantra of the TCPA and Palladium is offensive to me, because these initiatives do nothing to help me as a consumer have better trust in the machine -- if anything, they are hiding more of the operation of the machine from me.
I've been worried for about five years now that this would result in a very unpleasant change to the PC market. Instead of inexpensive, commodity hardware that can run either proprietary or Free Software, we may soon see a split market, in which the inexpensive hardware can only run proprietary software, and if you want to run Free Software, you have to buy much more expensive hardware.
This assumes that the manufacturing volumes for the open hardware would be considerably lower than for commodity hardware. Perhaps the xBSD and Linux operating systems are being widely enough adopted to prevent the prices of open (or mostly open) hardware from rising too terribly much. Only time will tell.
Of course, if legislation like the CBDTPA actually gets enacted, the situation will be much worse. Then rather than simply having to pay more money for open hardware, we would have to buy it on the black market. It is certainly comforting to know that our elected representatives in Washington are doing such a great job of protecting our freedoms.
Open Slate Project (Score:2, Informative)
Little tangible progess so far, but I now use Linux on a laptop to gain practical experience.
The project is activly seeking partners!