So there are elements that you can't print yourself because the technology to
do so doesn't exist. The casework can be printed though. There are also plans
to release the PCBs, but this is ultimately less important. There are certain
minimum thresholds that have to be met to get these pieces manufactured. The
practical usefulness therefore is minuscule unless this project succeeds and
it turns out that there is demand for variations and so on by other
interested parties. So the software and casework is much more significant
right now.
When you start talking about minimum numbers to manufacture something like a
laptop you are talking about somewhere in the ballpark of 100,000 units. To
give people an even better idea a 100,000 units is more like a trial run to
see if it'll be successful in the market place. We'll need to hit something
like 250,000 units in the long term. 250 units is basically like a small test
run. That's what is going on here.
Can it be done? Get involved and you'll be a part of answering that question.
Long term we need substantially more demand than what freedom-conscious users
can sustain so keep that in mind. We have to get both the technical minded
and masses on board.
To give people some idea of what numbers are like and how seemingly
insurmountable an effort like this is I'll provide some estimates of demand
for other devices within the GNU/Linux world. Among all the GNU/Linux users
regardless of who is or isn't concerned about freedom there is a demand for
about 500,000 USB wifi adapters a year. No small entity is going to be able
to get anywhere near filling that entire demand or even a small percentage
of. Even filling 10%-20% is impressive. The majority of that demand will be
filled accidentally. That is people buying random hardware and it
coincidently it working [because others like myself have worked to get the
code released / chipset supported]. There will also be large quantities
bought by companies whom have tested different hardware components. So for
example a company selling kiosks to T-Mobile might buy a Linksys wifi card.
Linksys doesn't know anything about the chipset and even the manufacturer
upstream of Linksys likely knows nothing about it either. But none-the-less
it works so they use it. [yes- often companies get into trouble here because
they don't understand that the model doesn't equal a chipset, but
none-the-less the practice continues].
