On 10/12/06, Terry Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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. ;-)
I don't know if I would take it that far. I've lost some of my best
developers to remote mountain ranges and monasteries. I wish there was
a way to justify every idea with a material advantage, but alas, some
ideas simply stand on their own.
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.
GNU's utilities were for the most part OSless (sorry). I would argue
their radical ideas made them what they were. People were willing to
suffer the utilities to be a part of the event. I know I was. That
goes double for the early days of Linux (not so much for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux I'm sorry to say :)
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).
There was a time that held true for software. Making the impossible
possible is technology's job. We're about to cross that very Rubicon
for hardware, and it's a very exciting time to be doing this.
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.
Open Cores is still the software model applied to hardware. What is
key here is that the industry and the technology are at a point where
the fundamental definition of hardware design will enable a true open
source hardware that has never been possible before.
This is a wholly new phenomenon. Technical considerations are not
enough. To carry this off, we need political capitol. We are asking
civilization to accept a fundamental change. Even though it has just
now become technically possible, we need the trust and the support of
a lot of different institutions in order to be granted the privilege
of being the ones to make it happen.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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_Lance
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