On Friday 13 October 2006 16:46, Dieter wrote: > > > The fact is, any card that they might release full specs for would > > be just as old-tech as OGA, if not worse. They're not going to > > give up their money-makers at the high end, so they'll start > > selling $24 Radeon 7000 cards again. > > Sigh. Even the founding father of an open hardware group thinks of > releasing specs as giving up a money-maker.
No, he thinks that nVidia and ATI make most of their money with the most expensive and recent of their cards, rather than with the older versions. It's the cards that are being described as money-makers, not the specs. > We need a whole new economic system. Capitalism is killing people > and the planet. Communism didn't work out so well either. We need > a way to eliminate the motivation for trade secrets. Patents and > copyrights are supposed to do this, but they aren't getting the job > done, despite the widespread abuse of them. I don't think it's in the ideas, it's in the execution. Free markets are nice, but they don't exist. Corporations have way too much power and influence on the market. Just about all markets are oligopolies: a few huge companies that know exactly what the others are doing. While what we need is a whole lot of companies all competing against everyone else, and a market with a very low barrier to entry. Unfortunately, copyright lasts forever (especially relative to the current rate of technological development), so do patents (and there's no effective protection against low-quality patents, because the patent office isn't being paid enough to properly examine them), and to get into high-tech markets you need a lot of capital and a lot of patents to protect yourself with. The game is fine, but the big teams have all found the loopholes in the rules, and the referees don't call a foul when it's being made. What we need is an association that closes the loopholes, and pays its referees enough for them to be able to take a stand. Unfortunately, the big teams are against that, and are threatening to switch to another conference if they do so. What we have is not capitalism, it's corporatism. It's governments competing for the favour of the corporations, making the rules the way they want them, so that the corporations will come and create jobs for the people. People that can't create those jobs themselves, because the corporations control the market. Free software gave us back the free market for software-related services. If we can crack the manufacturing problem then we can do the same for hardware. OGD1 is the first step towards that: anyone with such a card can manufacture all kinds of different hardware in their own home, simply by reprogramming the card. It creates a free market for hardware design services. Lourens
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