{"id":758,"date":"2015-03-19T07:40:37","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T05:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.prunk.si\/?p=758"},"modified":"2015-03-19T10:26:45","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T08:26:45","slug":"free-hardware-designs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.janprunk.com\/?p=758","title":{"rendered":"Free hardware designs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Yeeloong2\"<\/a>In the recent years the Free Software Foundation<\/a> has encouraged (computer) hardware manufacturers to start producing free (free as in freedom) hardware. Most hardware produced and sold today has proprietary design (Apple, Intel, etc.) and is therefore restricted\/encrypted and hard to use with free software, requiring programmers to use reverse engineering<\/a> methods and write the code to free up parts of the hardware and optimize it for the use with free software. Free Software Foundation maintains a list of the high priority reverse engineering projects<\/a>. Free hardware would be optimized for the use with free user respecting GNU+Linux<\/a> software and should be released under the GNU General Public License<\/a> (GPL), version 3 or later. Currently there are few alternatives around free hardware designs. In 2012 the Free Software Foundation started a project with the Chinese manufacturer Jiangsu Lemote Technology Corporation Limited<\/a> for the production of the Lemote Yeeloong<\/a> netbook. Yeeloong’s used the early Loongson\u00c2\u00a02F, a single core MIPS3-compatible 64-bit CPU<\/abbr> with some custom ISA<\/abbr> extensions (not all used in software), therefore a lot of customized software still had to be written for it. For that purpose a special customized GNU+Linux distribution<\/a> gNewSense<\/a> has seen the light of day. Since then we have seen other alternatives to free up parts of the hardware. The project Libreboot<\/a> has written replacements for the standard BIOS using reverse engineering on Lenovo Thinkpad models, such as X60<\/a>, T60<\/a> and X200<\/a> which are all obtainable from the U.K. store Gluglug<\/a>. Another crowd funding initiative called Purism<\/a> has raised funds and started with the production of the free modern laptops. Micha\u00c5\u201a<\/span> Tomasz<\/span> Mas\u00c5\u201aowski has written about Laptops and free software<\/a> in 2013. There are also Replicant<\/a>, a free operating system that works as a replacement for Android based devices and libreCMC<\/a> a free replacement operating system for wireless routers. There are videos (with Slovene translations) from the Libreplanet 2013 conference, where Dr. Richard Stallman<\/a> talks about the free hardware designs (video part 1<\/a>) (video part 2<\/a>) and also explains the idea in his recent articles “Why we need free digital hardware designs<\/a>” and “How to make hardware designs free<\/a>“.
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