Libre Hardware

"We’re happy to share that we’ve released a GitHub repository of CAD and electrical documentation, all under an open-source Creative Commons license. In addition to 2D drawings of the Mainboard to help you design your projects, we’ve released two 3D-printable reference designs. One is a minimal VESA-mount holder that lets you attach the Mainboard to a monitor or TV, while the other is a fully featured small form factor desktop case. Both of these are easy to print on home 3D printers. Since these are open source, you are free to modify, remix, and redistribute them however you’d like to. All of this is a starting point for a broader set of open source Mainboard documentation to enable creation of fully compatible third-party Mainboards in the future."

Keep in mind that the article is kind of old, from 2017. I unfortunately couldn't find similar comparisons from more recently.

publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.ml/post/197440

Crowdfounding project on KissKissBankBank BE

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/193809

If you are familiar with software patents and would like to moderate an excellent database of campaign material against software patents, please respond below. This post will be pinned until ESP Wiki is sufficiently moderated.

ESP Wiki was created in 2008 as the main resource for activists, programmers, lawyers, and policy makers with the goal of abolishing software patents. In the past, it has worked as a community forum for FSF's amicus briefs to courts and has been cited by legal journals and articles. Lately it has gotten some serious updates: a new logo, a modernized theme, better categorization, brand-new custom wiki templates, etc.

It is not required to have a legal background, but you should be at least comfortable with reading legal information. You should also have a general understanding of basic legal procedure around patent law. But even if you don't know much, this is a great opportunity to learn some interesting details about this topic.

Do not hesitate to contact me at any point; this post will be up for a while.

You can read more about the End Software Patents campaign in the community's description.

Links:

• End Software Patents (main page)
• ESP Wiki

Say you're a hardware company and you want to make your motherboard design open source. Well, if your board has PCIe slots, the PCIe standard is closed source. If you want to use normal DDR DIMMs, that standard is owned by JEDEC. If you want USB, HDMI, SATA, etc, all those ports are closed standards too. Does that mean that it would be illegal for you to open source your board if it implements any of those standards, since the standards are closed and no one but the parent organizations can distribute them?

What about a CPU? Sure, RISC-V is open source, but if you want any industry standard interfaces like USB, PCIe, DDR, all of those would require controllers on the processor, which would require licenses to the standards, etc. Does that mean that we will never have a completely open source chip design unless the author also designed their own open source interfaces for basically everything?