I think it's important for everyone to take a step backward and realize that the design and manufacture of digital circuits will not always be the province of multinational organizations.
If the history of civilization has taught us anthing it is that something that required the resources of an entire society yesterday can be done by one man in a garage shop tomorrow. More often than not. Furthermore, technology, and all economics for that matter, progress not on physical innovations but societal ones. If Henry Ford could make an entire society move from the countryside to cities, then it is not impossible for every individual consumer to have exact control over the details of manufacturing. Certainly it is technically possible due to the very circuits that we are discussing. Finally, Stallman is a giant among giants, but his place is in the past and the present. He has chosen, for whatever reason, not to look to the future, so it is up to us. It is not up to us to question the personal decisions of a great revolutionary thinker like rms, but since he has definitively chosen to leave this fight to others, we are the only others. Both the economics and politics of manufacturing are every bit as malleable as software in a society where they are dreamed up and effected from scratch (i.e., nature is not involved much here, other than settnig constraints, we are the sole stewards), are shaped and decided by people like Timothy and the rest of us, just as much as software IP is influenced by rms and fsf. As I've said before on this list, my personal belief is that what we do with hardware, leveraging the proximity of the software template, can and will be transferred to every kind of manufacturing in the future. If I'm right, what is more important than this? On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:19 AM, Philipp Klaus Krause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > J.B. Nicholson-Owens schrieb: > >> >> I'd like to read or see some sources on the Stallman claim here. I'm >> aware of him discussing the illogic of a hardware copier -- physical >> objects are made anew rather than copied like data -- a prerequisite to >> directly map free software freedoms to hardware. But I'm unaware of >> Stallman dismissing the importance of hardware we can fully understand >> and control. > > "On free hardware", written in 1999, can be found in many places, one is > here: > http://features.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-06-22-005-05-NW-LF, > > In early 2007 he wrote this to Timothy: >> We encourage the idea of free hardware designs, but we don't think >> it is ethically required that all hardware designs be free, because >> most users are not in a position to turn a hardware design into >> hardware. > > > _______________________________________________ > Open-graphics mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) > -- _Lance _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
