Just like we have software developed by the community, for the community. Can we have the same ideology applied to hardware ?
Open plans and schematics, interoperable, standardized. I should be able to unplug a component from my computer and plug it into another one. I should be able to replace broken parts. I should be able to, if feasible, make it myself with off the shelf components.
Let’s appreciate general purpose computers before the war against them will be successful.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation
I can’t believe I’d never read that before despite being a fan of Doctorow in general. Thank you. Exceptional work. Should be mandatory reading.
There’s a great talk on the same topic he gave at the Long Now Foundation back in 2012, the Q and A adds a bit to the users vs owners chat
Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer’s camera and network connection.
That was THIRTEEN YEARS ago?!
I admit I have only skimmed this yet, but that was 12 years ago. Back then, copyright was a major problem for a free and open society in which people could freely communicate.
The world has changed since then. Those opposed to such a society are now more likely to talk about disinformation, radicalization, child porn, hate speech rather than copyright. Those pretexts aren’t really any better of course.
Quite a good follow up talk posted not so long ago.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Free and open source schematics. The schematics being free to build your own.
FOSH
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware the big difference is the cost of entry for a software project vs hardware. Software you’re looking at a computer and time. Hardware you need at minimum a few hundred dollars for pcbs, and chips.
Using available goods though, there are things out there. Check out WLED. https://kno.wled.ge/ it’s a software stack that runs on esp32 (mostly) boards to drive LEDs in very fun ways.
While probably not true FOSS hardware, Framework computers make it easy to change and fix
