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If you want to speak of "free hardware", what, concretely, should it mean? Can you propose a definition? I tried looking for one, and couldn't find one that avoided confusion. I now understand that when you speak of "the schematics" of a computer, you mean diagrams of _some_ of the circuits in it: the ones at board level. If I understand you right, this does not include the circuits inside the chips; they are not published. However, if you propose to use the term "free hardware", how would you define it? Clearly, published _partial_ schematics cannot qualify for that. You're saying that these partial schematics are useful even though they are not complete schematics. That makes sense. In addition, the circuit board is made by one company; the chips are made by various other companies. For that reason too, it is useful to judge the board separately from the chips. This is why I decided to formulate my ideas in terms of "free hardware designs". The design of the board in the PowerProgressCommunity notebook is published, it seems; depending on the license it carries, it may be free. If so, we can say that that design is a free hardware design. Meanwhile, the design of the processor chip in that product is not free. If you can come up with a good definition of "free hardware", I might join in using it. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
