Celebrate Hardware Freedom Day 2013

Blug_fred writes "The Digital Freedom Foundation is proud to announce the first celebration of Hardware Freedom Day on Saturday April 20th, 2013. While registration has opened about a month ago and early registrants will receive free banners, posters and swags as long as they register before Friday 15th, anyone who registers is of course welcome to celebrate the Day! So get your hackerspace into order, your team members ready and showcase your best 'Get Into Hacking workshop' to entice your neighbours to start. Still not lucky enough to be part of a hackerspace structure? Then use that day to meet people who will be willing to join you in the project!"

420 day

[Anonymous Coward]

Will anyone remember to go?

Re:

[Blug_fred]

Maybe you should start with "counting freedom day"?

One more reason to celebrate 4/20!

[mark_reh]

Yeah!

very different organization from the FSF

[Trepidity]

Whereas Richard Stallman famously asks people not to buy him parrots as gifts, Digital Freedom Foundation president Frederic Muller mentions in his bio [digitalfre...dation.org] that he owns a cockatoo, a Alexandrine Parakeet, three iguanas and five turtles.

Re:

[Hal_Porter]

This is hilarious

http://gizmodo.com/5853729/please-do-not-buy-richard-stallman-a-parrot-and-other-rules [gizmodo.com]

Richard Stallman is leader of the free software movement and father of GNU. Naturally, he's in demand as a speaker. And so NATURALLY he has a completely ride-the-orangutan insane tour rider.

"Ridge the orangutan" insane is such a great phrase.

From the link

https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007701.html [mysociety.org]

Andrew, I read all of Richard Stallman's email that you forwarded.
Don't book him. His rider is hilarious.

RMS winning friends and influencing people as usual.

From Finland

[jones_supa]

We present you RuuviTracker [ruuvitracker.fi], an open GPS tracker.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm a big fan of ThinkPenguin, which is one of the only companies supporting free software, but really, do I care about the freedom? Or do I care about my hardware working?

In some cases, these might be the same. If you don't have full control over your hardware the same way that HW manufacturers and the NDA-signing, proprietary-interface-equipped OS and SW manufacturers do, your machine can be exploited and rooted in a way that would be very difficult to remove. If you get owned like this guy [usahitman.com], how do you clean up the mess so that you can trust your HW afterwards? (Who knows what your firmware is doing right now in your machine.)

Re:

[unixisc]

Unlike 'software freedom', hardware freedom is more difficult since it would require that anything offered in silicon be offered on a reprogrammable FPGA. Or else, the user does not have the control to change how the hardware works. This 'free' hardware will inevitably be more expensive, as one would have to use FPGAs instead of ASICs, flash instead of ROM and so on. Question is - how many champions of either hardware freedom or software freedom are willing to pay more to get their free hardware? Those

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[AndreyFilippov]

We (Elphel) are an Open Hardware company for more than 11 years, all our products are distributed exclusively under Free licenses (GNU GPL, GNU FDL, CERN OHL). And yes - customers are willing to pay extra for the freedom they get. Of course it is not an easy business, production volume rarely can go high as most application require either single are just a few units, but our products are used in most US National Labs, NASA, many universities and research centers around the world. And it is fun to develop su

Re:

[sjames]

I have often found that 'hardware problems' can be solved by loading decent software. In some cases the software is working around hardware problems, in others it's just a matter of having less bugs and not causing 'hardware problems'.

Community Workshops & Hackerspaces are amazing

[capedgirardeau]

I just want let people know, if you have a local community workshop or hacker space, I strongly encourage you to check it out. I am lucky to have two in my area, one of the 8 TechShops around the US and a smaller, more community driven workshop (Maker-Works).

I found both to be amazing resources as far as tools, classes and community support are concerned.

I am one of those very introverted people, I do not go out much at all socially and really avoid going out in general if I can. I am also pretty geeky, pro

Horray hardware freedom day, er...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just we need to change the meaning of the word "freedom" because we certainly aren't going to get this intrusive copyright/trusted computing thing to come off the track any time soon

Freedom where freedom to choose equals this EFCI mainboard or that EFCI mainboard.
Freedom to choose MPEG-LA over MPEG-LA
Freedom to use only your real name
Freedom to not have usenet
Freedom to have an ISP filtering ports
Freedom to have all your communications copied and exploited under the guise of "state secrets"
Freedom to h

I thought 4/20 was mind freedom day

[davydagger]

I thought april 20 was the day you "free your mind"

Sure

[GrayWizard]

Freedom, freedom, freedom, oy! Freedom, freedom, freedom, oy!