![]() Universities, seeing the educational benefits, pitch in a bunch of cash. ![]() We stick up a KickStarter project for a million quid, offering a sliding scale for thank-you gifts – a working pc, a batch of chips, that sort of thing. The crowd-sourcing model is a bit more airy-fairy, but is still viable. They buy a load of these chips and make their mainboards, whereupon we buy one, and have a working mobo for our open-source PC… They like our design, so they “steal” it legally and make a few for their budget range – or something.Ĭompany-B makes budget motherboards for home builders and OEM’s. The big business model is simplified (horribly) like this: Company-A makes CPU’s for the server, workstation, and home computer market. There are two feasible ways to achieve this. ![]() So, assuming a hypothetical chip design, how can we make it real? Like I said above, we’ll need a million bucks. Let’s look at our next step:- Fabricating Chips Of course, the difference between a program and a chip is that once designed, a program can be copied for free, whereas it can cost a million bucks to prototype a complex print of silicon! The design on the other hand, is certainly achievable so far. In the same way that the Linux kernel and other free software projects are both funded and developed by big business as well as volunteers and hobbyists, we could have a standard, stackable processor design for anyone to manufacture. OpenCores is a community of chip designers, building “blocks” of micro-circuits that can be put together into all sorts of microchips, from motherboards to systems-on-chip like smartphones. A chip designer can run his circuit through a computer program to check for bugs. The good news is that they are also easy to emulate. The problem with chips is they are expensive to make. Open source, modular chip design released under free software licenses. The horse to back here is the OpenCores project. The OpenSPARC: an open-source processor by Sun Microsystems Chips Design We will also need all the software from embedded initialisation all the way to a web browser. We will need chips, circuit boards, and a case. These projects are already in place.įor the sake of argument, I’m going to start with the stalwart pillar of our digital lives, the humble desktop PC. ![]() In this article, I will hypothetically build a PC completely from open projects. Let’s build PC’s, smartphones, home servers, supercomputers, and everything else we need from community crowd-sourced funds, using open source designs. Add that to the new phenomenon of crowd-source fundraising and you have the start of something amazing… That’s not to mention all the cracking of warez, remixing of tunes, and fan-fiction that’s out there. The early digital age of sample tracking, the current age of Wikipedia, SoundCloud, and the Creative Commons. People have been sharing their creative works for hundreds of years, from the political pamphlets of Thomas Paine that helped shaped America, to the amateur ‘ zine communities. Browsers, office software, graphics software, operating systems, web-servers, mobile phone software – it’s great! Amid the world of heavily entrenched copyrights, patents, and trademarks, we have the phenomenon of “open source” software, released under freedom respecting licenses. Make something, share it, remix it, make it better, share it more.
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