Re: FSF continuously harms Free Hardware

[Richard Stallman]

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If you want to speak of "free hardware", what, concretely, should it
mean?  Can you propose a definition?  I tried looking for one,
and couldn't find one that avoided confusion.

I now understand that when you speak of "the schematics" of a
computer, you mean diagrams of _some_ of the circuits in it: the ones
at board level.  If I understand you right, this does not include the
circuits inside the chips; they are not published.

However, if you propose to use the term "free hardware", how would you
define it?  Clearly, published _partial_ schematics cannot qualify for
that.

You're saying that these partial schematics are useful even though
they are not complete schematics.  That makes sense.  In addition, the
circuit board is made by one company; the chips are made by various
other companies.  For that reason too, it is useful to judge the board
separately from the chips.

This is why I decided to formulate my ideas in terms of "free hardware
designs".  The design of the board in the PowerProgressCommunity
notebook is published, it seems; depending on the license it carries,
it may be free.  If so, we can say that that design is a free hardware
design.  Meanwhile, the design of the processor chip in that product
is not free.

If you can come up with a good definition of "free hardware",
I might join in using it.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)