3 ms·
It is interesting to read this through the eyes of the burgeoning Open Source Hardware (OSH) community. There seems to be an Free Hardware Foundation in Italy,
by cottonseed 13y ago
It is interesting to read this through the eyes of the burgeoning Open Source Hardware (OSH) community. There seems to be an Free Hardware Foundation in Italy, but I have never seen it mentioned before, and rarely do I see discussion of the sort of essential freedoms I see Stallman is talking about. However, I often see people struggling with (and reverse engineering) proprietary hardware, firmware and software. Hardware tools often come feature locked and internals are intentionally obscured, down to sanding the labels off chips. When the question of open tools comes up, the response is usually something like this: "How much demand is there for, say, a 100 MHz open 'scope that costs a bit more than a Rigol?" Taken from a recent discussion about Free/Open Hardware:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375771
Does the Free Hardware movement need a Stallman?
- vanderZwan 13y agoEh... you do realise Arduino comes from Italy, right? That's not a coincedence. I'm currently studying Interaction Design at Malmö Hogskola, and have had David Cuartielles as a teacher. I have also seen Massimo Banzi give a workshop on the Arduino in the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. So I can say from experience that there are Stallmans for open hardware out there.
- cottonseed 13y agoI think you misunderstand my comment. I know there are lots of advocates for OSH. But I don't think there is someone like Stallman who is advocating for free as in speech hardware the way Stallman does for software. I don't see the "social and ethical values" of the kind of freedom that Stallman talks about reflected in OSH discussions. However, I only see the English language part of the conversation, so something different might be happening in Europe/Italy.