Re: [fsf-community-team] Free Software, What about Free Hardware?

[Florian Purucker]

Dear all,

In the instance of firmware, there is even an FSF project going project
regarding the free BIOS:
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

Then there is a project about a free cellphone (even though I don't know
enough about it to say if they are trying to be completely free).
Unfortunately, they use the term "open" in their project name: Openmoko.

I also vaguely remember about a processor from Sun which had its
architecture released under a free license or was at least supposed to be
released that way. Doing a quick search, I only came up with something
called "Open Cores".

In the case of the processor, the question is anyway if you really gain
any freedom by being allowed to produce it yourself, because you cannot do
so anyways. I guess it depends on how far into the future you want to look,
so maybe in a couple of years, this will become feasible. With firmware it
is a totally different matter though, because that can be replaced and
modified relatively easily, so I think it should be free.

Florian