Patrick McNamara wrote:
We have identified that their is a problem with the closed nature of current hardware and have begun taking steps to fix that. While our focus is actually on creating the video card, perhaps as important is the creation of the OGD1 board.
Side note: as fodder for marketing spin, it is precisely this kind of "unintended" reuse advantage that free-licensed design most enables. Projects can spin-off in completely different directions simply because this design exists.
I have found it quite interesting to read the opinions this topic has generated. From the philosophy/advocacy side of things we have the argument that the identification of the problem and action on that problem is the newsworthy item and is the important achievement. The creation of the physical thing is a side effect.
Yes and no. Even from a philosophical/ideological standpoint, an idea that bears no fruit is, well, fruitless. ;-)
Even the GNU project was not a "success" until it started producing utility programs that could actually be used. In addition to be a pragmatic success, these developments established the *proof-of-principle* that free-licensed software development can be done. Linux was a much more impressive proof, because it was precisely the kind of project that many people believed could not be done.
With hardware, the credibility battle is much harder. The number of people who believe it can work is still small. Somewhere, I have an article by Richard Stallman himself, written in about 1999, in which he essentially claims that free-licensed hardware can't work. It's clear from reading the article that at that time, he had not yet become conscious of the distinction between free-licensing the *design* for a piece of hardware (which is of course, software) and free-licensing the actual hardware (about which, of course, he was correct -- nobody is talking about giving away the *hardware* for free).
Nevertheless, the misconception evident in his 1999 article is still prevalent in many other people's minds: the idea that free software only works because it is a "pure information product". I even made this mistake to some degree in the early part of my "Free Matter Economy" series (I'm annoyed with myself for choosing that name, in fact, because it suggests "an economy of free matter", when what I intended was "a free economy of matter" or even "a matter economy enabled by free-licensed design"). So, I think many people have some proving to do.
Strictly speaking, it's not the production of the OGD1 card that matters so much as proving that you *can* produce a piece of hardware from the OGP project (and actually producing OGD1 is the most effective way to do that). After that, there's basically very little credibility gap in producing OGA1, and we'll see a lot more support and belief in the project.
As for OGP and OHF, I think you should realize that you are competing for mindshare with older projects like Open Cores (of course, you want to cooperate more than compete, but AFAIK, there hasn't been much communication at all -- is that true?). For example, I recently read an article which described Open Cores as the 'the GNU project of free hardware'.
OTOH, what Open Cores does has little impact on end users, whereas an OGP graphics card has the potential to put an open hardware product in people's hands, and give them real benefits -- just like the GNU utilities did in the late 1980s.
Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
