Why We Need Free Digital Hardware Designs 78
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.
Already have (Score:2, Informative)
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Yeah, the person should google it instead of bloviating. If you don't know about Open Hardware, you're not the one to be telling us about it, eh?
No speculation needed, just a basic web search.
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The Ham Radio Group TAPR has this for their SDR projects which has been sucessful http://www.tapr.org/ohl.html
snip
"The TAPR Open Hardware License
The TAPR Open Hardware License is TAPR's contribution to the community of Open Hardware developers. TAPR grants permission for anyone to use the OHL as the license for their hardware project, provided only that it is used in unaltered form."
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OSHW License Guide is at http://www.inmojo.com/licenses/
Licenses
MIT License
Simplified BSD License
Modified BSD License
Creative Commons - Attribution 3.0
Creative Commons - Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0
TAPR Open Hardware License (OHL)
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respectfully disagree (Score:1, Interesting)
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Hardware is not the same. no one is going to even give away the raw materials.
Is it too much to ask that you read the summary?
Don't worry, no need to read the whole thing. Here's the appropriate extract:
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.
Or if that's still too much: free-as-in-freedom, not free-as-in-beer.
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I'd posit that you tend to see a lot of "crappy" OSS projects partially because there's no financial pressure to cull those products from the "market". As long as someone is motivated enough to keep developing a project, it will continue regardless of whether anyone uses it or not. Even when it's abandoned, it's still available for anyone to use and improve for themselves if they want.
Commercial products, by nature, have to be good enough for people to actually pay for them, since you're paying expensive
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Free software isn't about cheapness, its about freedom. Nobody restricts me to improve the tools I have, and everybody is invited to. Also, nobody restricts me to pay for it, and fund development. If all those companies and offices around the world would pay the half of what they give to microsoft for {libre, open} office, it would be the best product you can get.
What is your work worth when your company goes bankrupt, and your work doesn't get used anymore? When the company is bought by a larger competitor
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Thank goodness your proprietary religion keeps me from being subjected to the horrors of using your software.
I will say this much, proprietary seems to give better results for absolute beginners, since with Free Software there is no emphasis on that, but instead of tools people already know they need.
The best thing about Open Source was always escaping the crap software that you get when you pay.
Overpaid professions (Score:2)
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 o
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There is no reason Software Engineers should be making for than 50k a year.
Yes there is. It's called demand and supply.
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Everything always ends up being priced by supply and demand, in the long run. If you distort the market too far, you get shortages and wastage, and a black market where things are priced according to supply and demand. Labor isn't an exception.
Wage, as determined by supply and demand, is the signal for how valuable one more worker at some job is to the community. That is to say, it's a mix of how valuable the work is over all, but also how much the community actually needs one more person doing that wor
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Who cares? If I code for free and release it, people can use it. If I make a boatload of money off my use of the code, and still release it, then people can use it exactly the same.
Open knowledge separates the issues of pay and employment from having access to the shared set of knowledge.
Knowing that, if you're worried about pay, utilize information theory and tie your profit centers to information about specific customers with specific or un-shared needs.
Software is like plow design; it can't be expected t
Re: respectfully disagree (Score:1)
Open-Source Hardware (OSH) (Score:2, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware [wikipedia.org]
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
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Hey new guy, don't click links, it isn't safe. Don't read the summaries either, because Snow Crash + goase = all your base
Hardware has no protection (Score:2, Insightful)
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 o
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Just because there are idiots that do no research at Wired, does not mean it is news.
Or that they know what they are talking about.....
You want to copy a Pi? Knock yourself out. http://www.arduino.cc/ [arduino.cc] even provides you with their hardware designs directly if you want to take their stuff, modify it and even sell it to somebody else.
Then there are the multiple Software Defined Radio projects that have "Open Source" hardware out there. Check out GNU Radio, it connects to a number of "free" hardware designs.
opencores.org (Score:5, Informative)
Is there some new point to this?
Re:opencores.org (Score:5, Informative)
There are a lot of free designs and sites supporting them out there.
My favorite is opencores.org [slashdot.org]. They have a lot of free hardware IP, many using the standard Wishbone bus [wikipedia.org]. The cores can be used in an FPGA, or incorporated into an ASIC. It is a fantastic resource.
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This Wired article introduces "free hardware design" as something radical and new. Which is patently ridiculous. Opencores.org is just one of many many EE design resources.
Get this ill-researched article of my slashdot!
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90% of what's on Opencores is half-baked student projects. The other 10% I cringe at whenever browsing through the code and see horrible management of basics like clocks and resets.
Print (Score:2)
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Imagine being able to print an open source clone of a current gen processor or memory.
Extremely unlikely to happen. Current gen chip technology is so advanced that it requires extremely expensive equipment. Think billions of dollars.
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Here's a nice presentation of what it means to make state of the art integrated circuits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The other 3d printer I want to see is the one that lays down a weld bead instead of plastic.
tada [3dprint.com]
Add a computer milling machine and there is little you couldn't produce.
If you could print something on a fixture which would then be automatically relocated to a mill, you'd really have something. Namely, your part spit out without user intervention, as long as it only required one setup. With a 3.5D mill, even that limitation goes away, but I'm always thinking on the cheap...
Hello... 3D Printing...??!!!!!! (Score:2)
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...
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You're right of course that we'll probably never be able to 'print' a chip anywhere near as well as a billion dollar foundry can, but that's not necessarily to say that Free and Open hardware is totally pointless.
(And I'm ignoring the effort in designing a high-speed CPU. Even if fabrication were trivial, designing a competitive CPU isn't easy.)
A 'trusted' low-speed CPU in FPGA might still have its uses.
That said, we can do this today, but it doesn't seem to see much use.
The 'We need free digital hardware d
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A 'trusted' low-speed CPU in FPGA might still have its uses.
You can do that, but it won't come close to a hard CPU in terms of performance, price and capabilities.
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If you have a reason not to be using a general purpose CPU and doing the work in software, then there is no guarantee that they won't beat that general purpose solution with their FPGA. In which case, you're flat wrong. And since it varies for each case, and in many cases the FPGA will beat the same dollars worth of general purpose solution, we can say you're totally wrong too.
And since you can use the same hardware description to program the FPGA and manufacture an ASIC later, if you end up needing a lot o
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we can say you're totally wrong too
Steady on. Until FPGA can do a good job for real server or desktop use, it seems premature to just assume FPGA will win. You're right that they've proven very good at certain tasks, but we're not talking about your algorithm, we're talking about doing real computer tasks (GNU/Linux + GUI, say) on a trusted FPGA platform.
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I always assume that the full range of possible use cases are the... range of use cases being considered.
You're only interested in desktop computers, so rather than meaning "we're talking about..." that just means you're only thinking about a narrow subset of use cases. Therefore, you have nothing to add to what I said, even though to you whatever I said might seem off topic. But it is only off your own personal topic, not the topic of open hardware.
If you want an open desktop system, my assumption is you
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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 printe
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Tools for modifying open hardware designs (Score:4, Interesting)
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)?
Re:Tools for modifying open hardware designs (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry to tell you, but you and I are about the only two people in the world to believe this. I use gEDA, BTW, which is another free-as-in-speech alternative to KiCAD, and much older. So far, I have been very frustrated trying to make the case that open hardware designs need to be "elephants all the way down" -- FOSS from the hardware design, to the DA tools (and file formats and libraries), to the OS. In fact, I once had a several-post-long exchange with Limor Fried over at AdaFruit's forums where she finally closed off the thread with: "Tools don't matter." I think her opinion is outrageously misguided and short-sighted, but that is an example of what the leaders of the Open Hardware community are thinking. SparkFun must feel the same way, because all of their designs are released on cripple-ware tools, too.
I think we need an open hardware license that includes a clause about openly documented file formats at the very least, and I would push for a license that calls for design files released on open source DA tools. Imagine where the Linux ecosystem would be today without gcc. Gcc isn't a great compiler, but it is open source, and it got us where we are today.
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Tools only matter to the tool builders. Oh wait, that means us. LOL
You're not the only ones, btw.
I've been suffering with substandard open CAD since the 90s. I just wish it had the quality of GIMP.
Things are improving. Slowly, on the software side. But I expect some leaps and bounds soon, now that access to manufacturing is opening up.
The companies making money off the movement don't care about these details, they care about what can they tell people to do that they will understand, what will be easier "for
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There's also gEDA [geda-project.org] which is an open (GPL'd) EDA suite including a schematic editor, PCB layout tool, and a bunch of other EDA tools.
The big thing with open hardware is simply getting the hardware - RPi and Arduinos are popular because it's easy to get the hardware for minimal cost, and many people make it on behalf of others (well, not the Pi, but that's because of Broadcom).
Open hardware requires the ability to make money (i.e, commercialize) the design. This is not the evil "we will sell your design to mak
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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)?
Well, my board house recommended I switch from Eagle CAD to KiCAD, recently. It's picked up a lot of useful features like push routing and more importantly, plated slots. Why TF does EAGLE not have those? How do I mount a blasted USB connector!!!
Of course I didn't switch because my design a
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I make plated slots in Eagle by drawing a regular pad, and then drawing the slot in the milling layer.
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Yeah, but that doesn't specify if it's plated. I have to tell the board house specifically to make it plated.
I so slots by taking a bunch of THM pads and putting them very close. My board house has a procedure in place where they replace chain drilling with slots. Since it's specified as plated holes, the result is plated.
Both of these are ad-hoc procedures though and will require care going to another board house.
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Only a few things on that list are proprietary.
Never agree to adopt proprietary food or water. You do not want to know what happens when it is time to renew your subscription.
Only accept foodstuffs using an open interface.
upverter.com (Score:1, Interesting)
Upverter is not open source friendly (Score:1)
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
Free software means source code, not object code (Score:3)
3D Printing (Score:2)
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.