On Thursday 04 October 2007 00:42:29 Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > On 10/3/07, Lourens Veen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://www.xs4all.nl/~lourens9/softwarefreedomday2007_lourens_ogp_v > >2_en.odp > > It reads very nicely as slides. What will you be _talking_ about?
Talk? I have to talk? Nobody said anything about talking...can't I just show the slides? :-) There's some new ones up by the way, at http://www.xs4all.nl/~lourens9/softwarefreedomday2007_lourens_ogp_v3_en.odp Right, well, here's my story to go with the slides. I've put some more emphasis on the latter parts, as per Peter's suggestion. In fact, reading back, it seems like I'm going out there to make a statement :-). I won't be reading it out, I'll just be talking, so it'll probably come out slightly differently, but this is the gist of it. I've timed it, and I should be able to do it in 20-25 minutes, which I think is good. I might change the latter part a bit tomorrow, I think it can be polished a bit more (the ordering on the final slide needs to be improved I think), but overall I'm quite happy. And I need some sleep now. Slide 1: Title slide Good afternoon everyone, my name is Lourens Veen, and I am here to tell you something about the Open Graphics Project, with which I've been involved for a few years now, the Open Hardware Foundation, where I'm on the Board of Directors, and about Open Hardware in general. Slide 2: Overview This presentation really consists of two parts: first I'll tell you about the Open Graphics Project, its history and what we're currently up to, and then I'll talk about the Open Hardware Foundation and the philosophy and importance of Open Hardware. So let's begin. Slide 3: In The Beginning... In The Beginning... there was a guy called Timothy Miller. He was an avid user of free software, and when in 2004 it was time for him to buy a new computer he carefully selected the components for availability of Free drivers. Unfortunately, he found that none of the video cards he could buy new had any free drivers, as the manufacturers of these cards would not tell anyone how to operate them. As coincidence has it, Timothy worked at a company called Tech Source, designing graphics cards for medical equipment and air traffic control. And so he figured, if I can't _buy_ a documented video card, I'll just make one! Tech Source were supportive, but in the end decided not to take this on as a company product. Undeterred, Timothy, together with his coworkers Andy and Howard, decided to do it with the help of the community instead, and so at the end of 2004 the Open Graphics Project was born. The first thing that was done was to figure out what kind of video card they wanted, which resulted in the Open Graphics Architecture specification. Then, they started work on the Open Graphics Development board. I'll get back to both of these in a moment. In 2006, two formal organisations were founded, Traversal Technology and the Open Hardware Foundation, to support the Open Graphics Project. Many free software projects get along fine without such a formal organisation, but, as you probably know... Slide 4: Economics: Hardware vs. Software ...hardware is not software. For one, copying hardware is generally expensive, and "compiling" hardware, that is actually making something from a design, is also expensive. In fact, it's pretty much the same thing. If you want to build some actual hardware, rather than just to play with a design, you need to solve this problem. The thing is that with modern mass-manufacturing, the unit price of a piece of hardware goes down a lot if you order many of them. In theory, if enough people want a product, it should be possible to create a free design, and then collectively buy a million or so units at a low price per unit. I do believe that in the future we will see this start to happen. However, right now the OGP is pretty small, and it's unlikely that we'd get a million customers for our first product. So we're going to make some money in another way, by selling our designs to makers of proprietary hardware (i.e. like MySQL AB and TrollTech) and by targeting the embedded market. There are quite a lot of manufacturers of embedded systems who need graphics chips, and who aren't big enough to get good service and support from the big manufacturers. An open, documented and community-supported graphics chip would be nice for them to have, and that's what we intend to sell them. Of course, we'll buy a few of them ourselves for our Free desktop computers as well. Finally, as this is an open project, we'll need people to help develop the hardware and software around it. They will need some hardware to work with, and we plan on accepting donations and letting them buy development hardware at a reduced rate. Slide 5: Project Organisation So how does this work? Well, we have the Open Graphics Project, which is just like ordinary Free Software projects. It has a mailinglist and a wiki, and everyone is welcome to come and join in on the fun and help us develop designs. Next, there is Traversal Technology, which is a company that will sell designs and hardware, and provide a corporate entity for corporate customers to talk to. They are there to make sure that we can do what we want from a financial point of view. Traversal Technology was founded by Timothy, Andy and Howard, and they've been working very hard on moving the OGP forward. Third, there is the Open Hardware Foundation, which is a non-profit organisation that will handle donations and developer support. We've intentionally kept this separate from Traversal Technology, and Traversal does not influence the OHF in any way. Let's get back to the hardware. Slide 6: OGD1 image This is OGD1, the Open Graphics Development Board. In the middle you see this big black cooling fin, and beneath that there is a programmable chip. The board can be put into a computer, and then you can download your hardware design into the chip. The programmable chip will then act just like a normal chip with your design would, although it might run a bit slower and it's much more expensive, so that you can try out your design and test it. If it doesn't work, you fix the problem and try again, until you have a (hopefully) perfect design that you can make into normal chips. Aside from the programmable chip, there are two video outputs on the left, a bunch of RAM memory, and on the right room for a 100 pin expansion connector so that you can connect all sorts of cool hardware projects you might want to create. OGD1 is not just a tool for us, it's also a product. Traversal will sell them to anyone who wants them, and OGD1 will be quite competitive price/performance-wise. OGD1 is almost complete, and will be announced soon. Keep an eye on the website... Slide 7: Beyond OGD1 OGD1 is what we'll use to test OGA1, which is the hardware design for OGC1, our first "normal" graphics card. We, that is Traversal Technology, will also sell that chip, codenamed TRV10, without the board to the embedded market as I explained before. I don't know if any of you remember BitBoys. BitBoys was a Finnish company that, in the late nineties, were going to create a fantastic 3D video card that was better than what the competition had to offer. Unfortunately, every time they finished a design, the competition delivered something new and better, and they had to go back to the drawing board. They never got to manufacturing anything. We're not going to do that. OGC1 will be very modest performance-wise. It'll run your Linux desktop, but it won't play the latest games. That's okay, Linus' first release didn't run on supercomputers either. As you might have heard, ATI have, in careful terms, said that they were going to open the specs on their video cards. In fact, they've delivered partly on that promise already, giving out hundreds of pages of documentation on the 2D functionality of their recent cards. That is very good news indeed, because it means that we will be able to use their hardware with Free drivers. It doesn't really affect the OGP: we're not competing with them in the embedded market so we're good on the financial side, and since they're not going to open their hardware we'll still be the only graphics card with an open design that everyone can work on. Finally, OGD1 is not just suitable for video stuff, the possibilities are endless. Who knows what things people might design? And if there's a market for it, we'll have Traversal Technology set up to make it into real hardware. That concludes the first part of my presentation, and I'm going to move on to the other formal organisation of the OGP, the Open Hardware Foundation. Slide 8: The Open Hardware Foundation As I explained, the Open Hardware Foundation is the non-profit part of the Open Graphics Project. It is registered in Texas in the USA, and the Board of Directors has members from all over the planet. The short-term work of the OHF is to accept donations for the OGP and to help developers help the project and the world by subsidising OGD1's. Eventually, we would like to grow into a central entity that represents and promotes Open Hardware, just like the Free Software Foundation is for Free software. In the future, we could help people with legal issues, look at hardware licences to see whether they are open enough and so on. That's an interesting question by the way, what _is_ Open Hardware? Slide 9: Open Hardware Philosophy - Four Freedoms of Software (RMS) Richard Stallman, when he started the GNU project, defined the Four Freedoms of software. You need to be allowed to run the programme for any purpose, to adapt it to your needs, to share it with your neighbour, and to share your improvements with the community. Can we translate these to hardware? Slide 10: Open Hardware Philosophy - Freedoms in Hardware Running a programme translates to using a piece of hardware, and by that I mean operating or utilising it. Copyright law also talks about "use", but that is different, so don't get confused. The freedom to adapt software can be translated to the freedom to adapt hardware. Of course, whether this is feasible depends on the complexity of the hardware and on your skills, but that goes for software as well. As I said before, copying hardware is expensive, and sharing hardware between people is not the same as sharing software. However, what you can easily do is share the design, so that your neighbour can have his own device made by a manufacturer of his choice. Or he can do it himself, of course, or he can program a piece of programmable hardware with it. Finally, the freedom to contribute to a design means that the community can develop hardware together, so that everyone can benefit from better designs at lower cost. Slide 11: Open Hardware Philosophy - Freedoms in Hardware So what do we need for this? Well, to use our hardware, for example with Free drivers, we need documentation, or an open specification on how to use it. To change the hardware to suit your needs, you need access to the actual design documents, so you need an open design. Sharing designs is especially a good idea for so-called ephemeral goods, things where most of the cost is in the design. For example, the materials used in a microprocessor are cheap (it's made of silicon dioxide, also knows as sand) and while the manufacturing is quite expensive, it's very cheap compared to the money it costs to design a modern processor. So, if you share your design with your neighbour, you really help him a lot. Of course, he needs to have the right to build a piece of hardware according to that design as well. Slide 12: Open Hardware and Freedom Finally, I would like to talk about what Open Hardware is good for. Just like Free Software, Open Hardware is about freedom and about consumer rights. How many of you have a public transport chip card? I have one right here, and I'm very careful to keep it away from the corresponding gates in the Amsterdam subway. The Dutch privacy watchdog has already stated that if things don't change before the test turns into full-scale deployment, they're going to undertake legal action, and they've won the Big Brother Award 2007 as well. But what if the public transport companies say they change things, but don't? Who will know? Noone knows what's inside that turnstile, and what information on me this card contains. Open Hardware gets even more important when we talk about voting machines. We've had them for years now here in The Netherlands, and we have, by law, never been allowed to see how they work. That's strange, because you'd think that in a democracy the voting process would be completely transparent. But it wasn't. Fortunately, Rop Gonggrijp and his fellow hackers showed how crappy these things really are, and soon we will be able to vote again with a fool-proof red pencil. The votes will be counted with an optical ballot reader. I say it should be Open Hardware. Another point is Digital Restrictions Management. Basically, it's a tool for manufacturers to take away your freedom of choice. Buy your music from iTunes, and suddenly your only choice of music player is an iPod. Buy a different player and you have to buy your music from a different shop as well. If you buy a music player, it's yours, and it should play your music if you tell it to. All your music, so that you have the freedom to choose a shop. And if it's broken, you should be able to have it repaired by anyone who knows enough about electronics, not just by an official service centre that charges you more than a new device would cost. No wonder we have a waste disposal problem. Finally, if we're talking about Open Hardware computers, Open Hardware will allow you to use Free Software to use it with, and it will allow you to check that it really does what you tell it to. In the online era we live in, being able to control your digital environs is just as important as being able to choose who to let into your home. Don't give those rights away. Use Open Hardware. Thank you.
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