Timothy, Great commentary. I wanted to introduce you to Mohammed Kassem, the founder of Stone Soup Labs, and his mission in life recently is to produce exactly the free as in freedom logic design software you are talking about.
Yes, logic synthesis software is difficult. So is building a compiler, and so is building a supercomputer. So the first thing we all need to get over is the idea that someone needs to get 'paid' to develop this stuff. I grew up on a farm, and I made about half the income I need to survive working about 4 weeks planting and harvesting 140 acres of row crop corn & soybeans this year. I don't farm because it pays. I could get paid a hell of a lot better if I had kept my mouth shut while testing supercomputers at Cray, but someone made a business logic decision without explaining it to me, so I kept asking *why*, and how does this serve the graduate student running computational chemistry models on a Cray, and I never got a straight answer. I had the misguided notion that the students were the real Cray customers. But the students don't pay the bills, so they don't actually matter in regards to paying the bills. So I'm back to farming, and thinking about how am I going to be farming in 30 years. Well, my farm operation is going to depend on me being able to fabricate replacement silicon for farm equipment, because a $10 part cost chip failure is going to keep me from getting half a million dollars of crop out of the field, and I don't trust that I'll be able to find replacement parts. I really don't care if I get paid to develop the equipment I need to make sure my farm is going to run. All I really care about is do I have food, shelter, and energy. I can grow my own food, I can build a house if I need to, and if I can fabricate silicon, I can build power converters and solar panels. All that being said, when Mohammed and I finally *do* produce silicon from a full Debian Free Software guidelines toolchain, and I go talk to Best Buy with a nice looking aluminum cube that happens to include that entire toolchain and the CAD files I used to make the whole damn thing, I expect someone will decide it might be worth paying me because they want something changed, and they know I can make the change about 10 times faster than it will take them to find someone and get them up to speed on the tools I already know how to use. I'm looking at this as a 10-20 year investment. It might turn out that someone likes my Community Supported Development model for technology ( http://q3u.be/CSD.html ), and instead something happens in the next year. I'm not going to hold my breath on that, but I'm going to be around and working on this a hell of a lot longer than the average Cadence manager. We only need to find 3 or 4 more other nutcases with a long-term view like this, and the logic synthesis problem starts to get a lot easier. So what if it's NP-hard. If I can fabricate my own chips and build a supercomputer, I can put up a wind turbine and run the code a lot cheaper on a computer on my farm than what it costs the likes of TI, IBM, and AMD to pay for $200k/seat licenses, and having a 'professional' high perfomance computing system in someplace where electricity is expensive. On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 10:23:28AM -0500, Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > One of the challenges with the "everything should be free" viewpoint is > that there are so many things that are expensive to design and/or build. > All of the specs for OGD1 are available under GPL. Can you get one? > Well, there may be a few left you can get. > > Being "Free" doesn't mean anything if (a) there's no incentive to design it > in the first place or (b) you can read all about it, but you can't actually > get one. > > Besides OGD1, another example I like to point out is the lack of Free logic > synthesis software, competing with the likes of Mentor Graphics, Cadence, > and Synopsys. The main reason it doesn't exist is that the skills required > are very specialized, and none of the people with the skills are interested > in volunteering to write a free version. We could GET a free version if we > hired these people and paid them to code it, but where would we get that > money? The usual route is to recoup the investment by making the software > proprietary and/or patenting some of the technology. A socialized > alternative like Kickstarter wouldn't work because too few people would be > interested in the product, so it would never get funded. There's a good > reason why a Synopsys seat costs somewhere around $200K. > > BTW, if you have no idea what goes into logic synthesis software, don't > bother arguing with me. For one thing, the problem is NP-hard. That alone > make is extremely difficult. > > I think Free Software is very important, a cornerstone of modern society > and technology. It would be terrible if we didn't have that. Generalizing > a bit, I personally would prefer if scholarly work wasn't behind paywalls, > so that everyone could have easy access to research, although if that were > the case, I'd find myself having to pay a huge fee every time I published a > paper, which would limit the PRODUCTION of research. What's better? In > any case, although I firmly believe in the goodness of Free Software, I am > baffled by the people who seem to insist on adopting an extreme and > inflexible viewpoint, absolutely refusing to use a single braincell to > grasp the functioning and benefits of alternative systems. I had a long > email exchange with Richard Stallman that ended in him throwing up his > hands (so to speak) when we reached an impasse on how to get Free logic > synthesis software developed; neither of us could come up with a viable > solution. Even Stallman will admit that Free Software doesn't solve every > problem, ESPECIALLY when it's hardware-related. > > > On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Gregory Carter <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 12/05/2012 02:22 AM, Dieter BSD wrote: > > > >> Gregory writes: > >> > >>> I consider LINUX to be the state of the art reference for _ALL_ > >>> engineering > >>> > >> HA HA HA Good one! You had me going there, for a minute I thought > >> you were serious! > >> > >> > >> Really? > > > > Look guy, we either provide open access to _all_ science and technology at > > the lowest possible denominator to every human being on the planet or this > > little Darwinian experiment called the human species is going to come to a > > quick and very unceremonious end. > > > > I can assure you I am not joking. > > > > The rules and the way for effective competition and fair trade is laid out > > in how every piece of science and technology that is either enabled with > > LINUX or how it was designed 10 years ago to how it is being designed RIGHT > > NOW. > > > > Every social form currently in existence should be redesigned around the > > engineering direction and properties that are enforced using the GNU > > Version 2 license. Equal opportunity for all, no barriers to participation > > and excellence based on peer review and feed back is the only technology > > allowed to live, because technology only has one purpose. > > > > To serve the human race. > > > > Right now technology is being used to destroy, crush and create war for a > > bunch of damn greedy western institutions. > > > > This will change, or WE, and I mean ALL OF YOU will not have a life living > > or otherwise. > > > > -gc > > > > > > > > > > ______________________________**_________________ > > Open-graphics mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.duskglow.com/**mailman/listinfo/open-graphics<http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics> > > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) > > > > > > -- > Timothy Normand Miller, PhD > Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Binghamton University > http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/<http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti> > Open Graphics Project > _______________________________________________ > Open-graphics mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.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)
