I don't, however, I don't claim to live by the same free vs non-free
rules, I use what works for me.
Since these principles are not yours, you could very well have
misunderstood them. So you are criticizing me for something that
neither you nor I says is wrong. What's the point?
There is a free copier of hardware: you, me, or anyone with a certian
amount of skill, and the required wires and other parts. This is how
the entire home PC business started, the whole homebrew market.
That's true for some kinds of hardware, to a limited extemt. But
building copies by hand is very different from having a copier that
will copy them automatically. I don't consider them ethically the
same.
Hardware has source code. Virtually every major piece of a computer is
written and modelled in Verilog or VHDL these days, which is bytes on a
disk, in ASCII characters, which sounds pretty much like code.
"Source code" and "plans" are not the same thing. What makes software
source code special is that a program can compile it into a working
executable. To turn the plans for a chip into a working chip, you need
a fab line that costs millions of dollars.
Some day, if we all have personal fabs that can make chips, and robots
that can assemble them into computers, the situation for chips will be
much more like the situation for software today. In that situation it
might very well be important to campaign agains non-free chips and
non-free computers. But in today's situation there is no reason
to do so.
Technology can allow for "free" hardware, just as well as it can for
hardware. If there is "open-source" and "free" hardware designs and
code, anyone with a FPGA, or availability of various other technologies
can take this hardware design, make changes, and make it better.
You are talking about programs for FPGAs. Those are software, and if
they run on platforms where it is normal to install different
software, then they should be free.
But I think the FPGAs in products are more like the possible computer
in my microwave oven: nobody installs software in them, so they might
as well be circuits.
