I would like to see development of open source hardware. I don't think this will happen in a hurry because of a variety of reasons not limited to the large upfront cash required and as Steve Carl noted, the need for the project to remain profitable by securing intellectual assets against use by competitors. Preventing competitors or benevolent helpers from accessing the source (i.e. I am willing to use open source ideas in the form of frameworks, access to kernel sources and whatnot but not willing to share my innovations) is contrary to the spirit of open source: This I believe is what Fedora is alluding to. Ubuntu and others that include binary code are not wrong because theirs is not the same argument: They believe that the greater good to the end user (society), by making the system available to the end user in a way that is most useable with existing hardware, supersedes the hard-line principle that open source software should only be distributed packaged alongside other open source software.
Two rights make a ... right?
Posted by
Steve Carl
at
2007-08-29 16:03
I am not in any way meaning to be critical of Fedora at all, and in fact spent a fair amount of time the other day furthering this in my personal blog over at http://on-being-open.blogspot.com. Fedora is 100% correct. So is Ubuntu. What I worry about is that while Fedora is being 100% right they are also ceding mind and market share to Ubuntu when it would not be hard for them to do a similiar thing as Ubuntu.
I sort of think of the Ubuntu "Restricted Source Manager" as a "Red Letter": Notice to people that not everyone is playing 100% openly. Those who do not care now will either come to care later as they learn more about what Open Source is all about, or they will never care, and no harm has been done!
Open Source hardware is another topic about which I am interested: There is the Linux BIOS project of course, and I can not wait to try that out when the time comes. But there is also Sun's Open Sourceing UltraSparc and Niagara. It would seem to be full of future potential, and I am watching that space with great interest.
I sort of think of the Ubuntu "Restricted Source Manager" as a "Red Letter": Notice to people that not everyone is playing 100% openly. Those who do not care now will either come to care later as they learn more about what Open Source is all about, or they will never care, and no harm has been done!
Open Source hardware is another topic about which I am interested: There is the Linux BIOS project of course, and I can not wait to try that out when the time comes. But there is also Sun's Open Sourceing UltraSparc and Niagara. It would seem to be full of future potential, and I am watching that space with great interest.