Open Hardware and Software Laptop

New submitter mihai.todor85 writes "It looks like Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has been quite busy lately, developing a nice open hardware laptop. He was even kind enough to provide all the schematics without NDA. For anybody interested in owning such a device, he says that he 'might be convinced to try a Kickstarter campaign in several months, once the design is stable and tested' if enough people are interested."

Re:Except that it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you trust a network card with a Chinese binary blob to run it? My strawman could have a much bigger backdoor than the average blob'ed SSD.

What do you think those Chinese-manufactured chips are if not binary blobs? The fact that the logic isn't loaded by the OS doesn't make a whit of difference.

Re:scratching an itch that may not exist

[Yvanhoe]

My personal itch is that we are at a point where BIOS and firmware can be suspected of hiding some backdoors. Having a verifiable design with 100% of the source of any code running on any chip inside is actually an interesting goal.

Re:that will make RMS happy?

[knarf]

Open source has won the battle for the server, but is in a losing battle for the client, with walled gardens springing up all over.

Android [android.com] is the biggest mobile platform at the moment. It has eclipsed Microsoft in the number of installed systems. Although these typically are not traditional desktop/laptop PC installations, the market seems to be heading more in the direction of Android (and similar systems) than it does towards those 'traditional' PC configurations.

In other words, the biggest platform at the moment is open source. Never mind that are several closed markets which serve this platform, you are not bound to them.

A quick look around the farm here shows that the advent of Android has pushed the last stronghold of closed source - mobile - off the cliff. All our PC's, servers and laptops run Linux in some form or other. All our phones run Android in some form or other. All our tablets run Android in some form or other. There is a television in the house somewhere, served by a DVB-T [wikipedia.org] receiver/decoder. The thing runs Linux. The DSL modem? Linux. The router? Linux (OpenWRT). There is only one remaining 'closed' box attached to the network here: the (HP Laserjet 2200) printer. Guess which of all these devices is the most troublesome?

In contrary to what you state, gaining software freedom has never been as easy as it is now. Even better: it looks like it will become easier still with the advent of open hardware.

Re:that will make RMS happy?

[serviscope_minor]

free & open-source software existed before RMS

No. Please at least try to educate yourself on the basics.

Before RMS there was no Free Software. There was open source. In fact most software was open. The Free Software movement was started in response to the closing of software. Specifically when a company took a printer driver written by RMS, tweaked it and refused to give him the source.

Free Software as a mechanism to protect user freedom certainly did not exist before RMS created it.

i seem to recall that we got by just fine ...

Yeah, the unix wars were great. I enjoyed them.

Shitty fucking awful terrible proprietary embedded venduh compilers were lovely too.

Of course humans survive. It would be very, very hard to wipeout th human race.

But the world is certainly a better place because of RMS.