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Message
From: Erez Birenzwig<erez_birenzwig@y...>
Date: Fri May 14 22:52:40 CEST 2004
Subject: [oc] One issue about free hardware
> A typical NIC card has one ASIC, doing all the logic processing,
> from receiving the packet to transferring it over the PCI bus. It
> has at least 100K transistors, do you feel like looking at them
> one by one through a microscope to make sure they are all doing
> what they suppose to do ?
>
> My suggestion was to develop a program to automate this process.
>
I believe the promlems in generating an automated program to do this
have been explained in this thread more then once.
As to the point of free hardware, unfortunatly, hardware cost money,
it's not just buying a computer and downloading a free Linux variant from
the internet, and you're ready to play with C.
Hardware requires a bit more. Even if you take the two big vendors of FPGAs
Xilinx and Altera, they provide propriatry software for free for all of the
small
FPGAs they sell. Once you want to design something larger then that, you
have
to buy their software. Their software include all the basic HW functions,
from
synthesis to place and route. The synthesis isn't the best, but it works.
The second part to this is that you have to buy a development board, which
usually
cost some money, which is exactly the money most people don't want to spend.
And if you want to actually use it for something, you'll have to buy another
one,
and so on. You can't just keep the result on the hard drive and use it when
you feel like it.
> It's all open source,
>
> I decline to describe my work as "open source" or discuss it under
> that heading, because "open source" is the slogan of a movement formed
> to reject the views of the free software movement that I support. See
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html for more
> explanation.
>
Again sorry for the "open source" title.
I also believe that the idea of free software is an interesting one. It
doesn't change anything
for most big companies though. Because most computer users don't know how to
set up
their computer (Either Linux, Windows or OS-X) you just change the business
model,
instead of selling software you sell services or solutions (e.g. Sun), and
you hope that someone
is developing the software you need, or you just do it your self.
This business model is good for large companies, most small companies can't
afford that
and they will just collapse. Small companies can't write all the software
they require, and
there is a lot of software out there that doesn't exist as free software.
There are many reasons
for that, but the main one is, if it's not main stream it's not there.
Erez.
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