Or, should I stop being nervous and live with my Intel x86-64 Pentium machines?
Trisquel and other FSF-approved operating systems are probably only made for
x86 and x64 because of those architectures' popularity. However, those
architectures, according to Wikipedia, are closed and demand royalties. I do
not know what those royalties are, but they cannot be good. Open and
royalty-free alternatives (according to Wikipedia) would be Itanium (IA-64),
Mico32, and SPARC. (MMIX has not been implemented in hardware, so does not
count.) Why do none of the FSF-approved operating systems support these
seemingly more freedom-friendly architectures? Why not encourage such a
change? Is it because Itanium and SPARC are aimed at the workstation market
and thus too expensive? Perhaps we can encourage Oracle to make a SPARC PC,
Intel to make an Itanium PC, or Lattice to make a Mico32 PC. Of course, we
might need to remind them often to keep it open-source and royalty-free!
- [Trisquel-users] Open Hardware Architecture det31995
