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Hardware designs require prototyping for any significant amount of complexity. Prototyping requires a back and forth costing many thousands of dollars. Obviousl

Hardware designs require prototyping for any significant amount of complexity. Prototyping requires a back and forth costing many thousands of dollars. Obviously RMS didn't read this: http://www.mauve.plus.com/opensourcehw.txt http://www.mauve.plus.com/opensourcehw.txt

TD-Linux 12y ago
>Prototyping requires a back and forth costing many thousands of dollars. This is a problem that is being rapidly solved in the OSHW community, with low cost PCB prototyping services such as OSH Park and similar. Something of the complexity of a laptop motherboard may still be in the thousands of dollars range, but a large variety of hardware is now incredibly affordable.
- striking 12y ago
  Even something like a low-cost phone would fall under this. Unless you're making a simple control board for a physical process, OSH Park won't cut it. And of course RMS is talking about computing. Anything at the general computer level is probably not going to work out unless it's really tiny.
  - bcg1 12y ago
    RMS thinks on much longer timeline than many of us.
madengr 12y ago
So true!
agumonkey 12y ago
Maybe, just maybe, there are other ways. Musk did it with rockets. I'm not knowledgeable, but very often, long proven techniques and status quo let people stop trying to find alternative paths.
shiggerino 12y ago
>Prototyping requires a back and forth costing many thousands of dollars. This is true of software as well. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
restalis 12y ago
Hardware development is well, harder than its software counterpart, true. For one, it's about what that article said about the costs involved, although I don't fully agree on the suggested costs per iteration, as the testing can be mostly done by simulators and the physical implementation can be only a last step in a broader development chain. For other, unlike the software, on the hardware level you are actually into real engineering, forced to deal with the real-world quirks and imperfections. The hardware complexity can not just balloon as the software does. You can not add there "features" for the sake of it (so just to scratch your intellectual itch) without much of a consequence like you do in software, and this makes it boring and a less appealing target for development. When it happens however, you got that described problem about having to read hundreds of data-sheet pages and then deal with both all that hidden complexity and the real world. That being said, with some discipline, the hardware development can be done!

TD-Linux 12y ago

>Prototyping requires a back and forth costing many thousands of dollars. This is a problem that is being rapidly solved in the OSHW community, with low cost PCB prototyping services such as OSH Park and similar. Something of the complexity of a laptop motherboard may still be in the thousands of dollars range, but a large variety of hardware is now incredibly affordable.

striking 12y ago
Even something like a low-cost phone would fall under this. Unless you're making a simple control board for a physical process, OSH Park won't cut it. And of course RMS is talking about computing. Anything at the general computer level is probably not going to work out unless it's really tiny.
- bcg1 12y ago
  RMS thinks on much longer timeline than many of us.

madengr 12y ago

So true!

agumonkey 12y ago

Maybe, just maybe, there are other ways. Musk did it with rockets. I'm not knowledgeable, but very often, long proven techniques and status quo let people stop trying to find alternative paths.

shiggerino 12y ago

>Prototyping requires a back and forth costing many thousands of dollars. This is true of software as well. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

restalis 12y ago

Hardware development is well, harder than its software counterpart, true. For one, it's about what that article said about the costs involved, although I don't fully agree on the suggested costs per iteration, as the testing can be mostly done by simulators and the physical implementation can be only a last step in a broader development chain. For other, unlike the software, on the hardware level you are actually into real engineering, forced to deal with the real-world quirks and imperfections. The hardware complexity can not just balloon as the software does. You can not add there "features" for the sake of it (so just to scratch your intellectual itch) without much of a consequence like you do in software, and this makes it boring and a less appealing target for development. When it happens however, you got that described problem about having to read hundreds of data-sheet pages and then deal with both all that hidden complexity and the real world. That being said, with some discipline, the hardware development can be done!