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Comment by minimilian | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that we can have completely free computers soon?

(People forget about foundry IP, miscellaneous analog bits of CPUs, the actual physical cost of manufacture, and the question of what "free/libre" actually means for hardware.)

I think it's interesting even just to try to define an "IP-free computer" in a clear way. Like presumably we don't care if minor components like resistors or screws are proprietary, because it's trivial to replace them with a different supplier. Or taking it to the extreme, obviously we don't care where the steel in the screws comes from. Steel is steel, even if being a steel company requires tons (kilotons?) of proprietary machinery. It's hard to even figure out where the screws in a computer come from, much less the steel.

Steel is steel, but there's a whole question of "rare" minerals that Freephone were looking at. Tantalum capacitors require a mineral that's sourced from the warzone in the DRC!

Depends whether you mean "free" as in "zero financial cost" or "free" as in "all the RTL, firmware, and software source code is available to anyone with a permissive license that permits derivative works".

RISCV is an open ISA, it has absolutely no legal influence over the openness of a chip that implements it.

It has a lot of influence actually; simply because it allows an "Open Source" chip.

https://libre-soc.org/ is going for free hardware with free tools, but the value of "soon" might be quite high. There was a previous item on 180nm silicon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27772066

You can have them yesterday (RISC-V or else), if performance isn't a concern and if you're OK with deploying said computer inside a FPGA.

The fine article points out that RISC-V is succeeding because it allows businesses to create processors customized with their own (no doubt proprietary) extensions for their own needs. So unless somebody wants to pay the immense engineering costs to create a completely libre processor, no.

Yes

think for a minute - the energy inputs, the materials inputs, the transportation inputs, the intellectual work inputs, the software architecture advances inputs..

asking for "free" in the face of these factual inputs, appears to echo the most lazy and gluttonous of human instincts.. really unproductive, spoken from a person who has tried to confront the excesses of American markets e.g. software patents, rent-seeking models, etc..

also spoken from a person who defends regularly "free as in Freedom, not free as in BEER" .. this is a call for free beer in the worst form.. really unproductive

I think the GP meant as completely free as in speech free. A computer made of 100% open source components, all chips with Verilog, all masks etc for the PCB... and I think I that is a long way off.

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