Richard Stallman wrote:
I'm curious how you can recomend an OS, like gNewSense that only runs on
non-free hardware, that
has required non-free software to be used in it's creation?
How do you do these things? Perhaps I do them the same way.
I don't, however, I don't claim to live by the same free vs non-free
rules, I use what works for me.
The term "non-free hardware" is misleading, because the issues that
divide free software from non-free software do not apply to hardware.
There are no copiers for hardware and it has no source code.
There is a free copier of hardware: you, me, or anyone with a certian
amount of skill, and the required wires and other parts. This is how
the entire home PC business started, the whole homebrew market.
Hardware has source code. Virtually every major piece of a computer is
written and modelled in Verilog or VHDL these days, which is bytes on a
disk, in ASCII characters, which sounds pretty much like code.
There is a monetary cost to copying hardware (fabrication fees, board
manufacturing) and software (power to run the system, the cd media, the
internet feed), and while these are vastly different sums of money, they
are both non-zero, so monetarily, both cost something.
Technology can allow for "free" hardware, just as well as it can for
hardware. If there is "open-source" and "free" hardware designs and
code, anyone with a FPGA, or availability of various other technologies
can take this hardware design, make changes, and make it better. Things
can be contributed back to the community, and IP-free hardware systems
that are actually useful can exist. With an FPGA, (yes, this may require
the use of non-free licenses to create the fpga, this is unfortunate for
now), any user can modify and improve their own system with no
fabrication costs, just like software.
As for Intels use of non-ree software, I am sorry for them, and I hope
that someday they will be able to move to free software.
Yet you still support them, and require gNewsense users to use Intel/AMD
hardware?
