Free Hardware

Recently, free operating systems seem to lose ground on the desktop. Even in Linux user groups, there's a mass migration towards Mac OS X as a desktop Unix. Next to still existing gaps in user software, the main reason is increasingly problematic hardware support for laptops, WLAN and 3D video cards.

• There is almost no video adapter on the market whose hardware acceleration is supported by free drivers. The duopoly of ATI and Nvidia thinks it gains a competetive advantage through proprietary hardware with non-open specs.

• There are almost no WLAN chips that run without proprietary drivers. One reason for this is that free drivers would allow modern WLAN cards to broadcast in blocked frequency bands.

• There is almost no laptop with fully working power management and hardware support through free software. Most hardware manufacturers have standard-incompliant ACPI designs and use proprietary hardware components like "WinModems" or the aforementions video and WLAN chips.

• Hardware-based DRM and hardware-encryption technologies like "secure video path"/HDMI threatens to render a whole range of hardware inoperable under free operating systems.

As a result, free operating system increasingly turn into mere server OSes. To be ready for mass adoption, free software needs hardware with open designs or at least open interface specifications. In the age of DMCA and DRM, such hardware seems increasingly hard to come by.

Aside from a few small projects, there exists no large movement for open hardware standards yet.

Possible Speakers

• Theo de Raadt, project leader of OpenBSD and OpenSSH, vocal critic of Linux driver developers for their acceptance of non-disclosure-agreements. He convinced Taiwanese hardware manufactureres to open up the specifications of their products. This earned him the "Award for the Advancement of Free Software" of the Free Software Foundation in 2004.

• Graham Seaman, Oekonux and free hardware activists in England.

• F-CPU project, development project for a free CPU design.

• Sun has published and opened up the design of its UltraSparc CPU recently.

Material

• Graham Seaman's collected resources on free hardware
• Richard Stallman on free hardware

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