Re: FSF continuously harms Free Hardware

[Richard Stallman]

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     > "Essentially, "free hardware" means that you can make
     >  the hardware yourself."

I agree that that would be the ideal state of affairs, for hardware.
You should be able to make all the digital parts yourself, including
the chips, boards, and so on, and then construct them.

However, that world is a long way off.  Years of advances would be
required to get there.  It makes no sense trying to score today's
products based on how close they come to this -- none will come close.

I think https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-hardware-designs.html explains
this.

     > There is room for a "free (as in speech, aka libre) hardware"
     > movement but the historic moment is much closer to the earliest
     > days of GNU when people could see powerful-enough "personal computers"

I disagree.  In the early days of GNU, quite a few people had access
to computers powerful enough to build our own software and use it.
Mostly we did not _own_ those computers, but that didn't matter: we
could use them.  Each piece of GNU _was_ useful as soon as it was
released, or before.

We have a long way to go to reach such a situation for computer
hardware, where you can make the chips, boards, etc., and put them
together, and make a computer you can run GNU/Linun.
I don't expect to live to see 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)