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You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly, I suspect the war has already been lost. No way! We're FINALLY seeing an uptick in the open hardware fr
by mikegioia 12y ago
You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly,
I suspect the war has already been lost.
No way! We're FINALLY seeing an uptick in the open hardware front. Open hardware like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards, as well as a ton of new IoT startups (like Spark and their Photon), and the bevy of open sensors (like Grove's) are drastically lowering the barrier to entry for hardware tinkering and even garage-style production. Just check out Seeedstudio's online shop to see how many different hackable hardware options we now have.
For $20 you can buy a WiFi "kit" that you can plug an array of $10-20 sensors onto. That opens up A LOT of doors for people to either create budget hardware products to sell, or for inexperienced home users to piece devices together. If wifi/gps/gsm chips and sensors can be plugged together like Legos, and if software can be "beamed" to it from their Phone, then you now have a perfect breeding ground for cheap, open hardware products available to the masses.
I look on to the next 5 years with nervous excitement; I myself have even begun planning a cheap cloud storage device using nothing but an RPi, external hardrives, and a few parts from Newegg that I can assemble in a couple minutes. That's an open replacement for Apple's TimeCapsule that anyone could put together in 10 minutes if a kit of the parts were sold to them.
- EvanAnderson 12y agoA slight nit-pick: If the end-user is required to use a third-party hosted service to make the gear work then it's not really open hardware.
- mikegioia 12y agoYea I totally agree. What I described requires no third-party hosted service, though. In my particular example of the cloud storage device, I use Pulse for file sync and GPG/rsync to upload archives to Amazon Glacier. None of that is closed source or involving any third-party.
- pigeons 12y ago> Open hardware like the Raspberry Pi You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software. That seems pretty far from "open hardware". True that likely any similar project requires closed source drivers for things like the EC/embedded controller, 3D acceleration, and maybe the 802.11 chip, but at least you can choose to boot and use the system without support for the closed devices.
- scrollaway 12y agoGP said "we're finally seeing an uptick" and your rebuttal is that everything is not perfect. Please stop. This mindset is actively harmful. There's no "giant leap", it's all small steps.
- bradyd 12y ago> You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software. I thought that this was no longer necessary[1], but after searching around I'm not sure if this means it is possible to boot without the blob. Does anyone know if this is the case? [1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/
- GauntletWizard 12y agoThe blob has been open sourced, their followup post describes the steps to build it from scratch: http://www.raspberrypi.org/quake-iii-bounty-we-have-a-winner/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/quake-iii-bounty-we-have-a-winner...
- rasz_pl 12y agono, 3d driver part of the blob is semi open blob is still closed source black box of secret sauce (video encoders/decoders, IO ports, bootstrapping)
- zz1 12y ago> Open hardware like the Raspberry Pi You mean "like Olimex A20 Olinuxino which has the same form factor of the Raspberry Pi but unlike the latter is open hardware and runs on open source software only", right? https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO