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A Manifesto for Free Appliances
The Free Appliances project
has issued a manifesto for free Appliances. "Just as there is a need
for Free Software, there is a need for free (as in speech) appliances.
Free Appliances can be modified or enhanced using GNU/Linux tools or other
Open Source Software, preferably licensed as GPLv3. They have no binaries
without source code. They adhere to generally accepted standards as much
as possible. Their documentation is open. They favor open file formats
since information in open file formats should not require DRM. They do not
use proprietary components when there are generic ones widely
available. (For example: batteries should be replaceable.)"
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A Manifesto for Free Appliances Posted Apr 30, 2007 21:46 UTC (Mon) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] Here's a purely open hardware/open source project: David Rowe's ( http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?p=27 ) IP04 blackfin/asterisk based pbx.
A Manifesto for Free Appliances Posted Apr 30, 2007 22:25 UTC (Mon) by EmbeddedLinuxGuy (guest, #35019) [Link] The Maker's Bill of Rights is a good checklist for user-modifiable appliances. It identifies physical characteristics which facilitate aftermarket tinkering.
A Manifesto for Free Appliances Posted Apr 30, 2007 23:01 UTC (Mon) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link] At least in the US, the controlling influences are those of liability for product safety issues, and electromagnetic radiation (EMI/RFI, FCC part 15, etc.) Free(libre) software is far down the list.
A Manifesto for Free Appliances Posted May 1, 2007 0:48 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I don't understand the connection between what your talking about and what this project is about.
A Manifesto for Free Appliances Posted May 1, 2007 8:28 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] >> At least in the US, the controlling influences are those of liability for product safety issues, and electromagnetic radiation (EMI/RFI, FCC part 15, etc.) Free(libre) software is far down the list.> I don't understand the connection between what your talking about and what this project is about.
I'll step in: liability for product safety issues and electromagnetic radiation oppose user-tinkerability. If you let people tinker with their car's ABS, an error can cause an accident; likewise, if you let people crank their wifi hotspot to 20Watts then planes, ambulances, police car radios, and other important stuff can start being interfered with -- and I guess that is not good. And (at least in the US) it seems that the user-tinkerable appliance maker is liable for the damages (which is absurd, but...) Obviously, my 2c etc etc IANAL TINLA :-)
A Manifesto for Free Appliances Posted May 1, 2007 9:01 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well...
You do realise that I can (and sometimes will) 'tinker' with the brakes on my car, right? Just to repair them, but I don't have any problems doing it.
Lots of people modify cars to make them faster, or cheaper, or whatever.
I don't think that anybody has sued Ford for not trying to stop people from dropping V8's into pickup trucks and then rolling their car in the country somewere becuase they were driving too fast.
Anybody else can do that also. It's not illegal, it's not going to increase the liability for car manufacturers that they don't padlock the car hoods of their automobiles shut or incase electronic parts in blocks of plastic to prevent tampering.
People have always been able to take apart and modify how analog radios behave. People have always been able to do things like modifying cable tv signal boosters from radio shack to amplify their little CB transmitters or create their own neighborhood TV stations.
To my knowledge RadioShack has not been sued because they didn't work hard enough (or work at all) to prevent this.
Why all of a sudden adding software to hardware is all of a sudden going to increase the liability of manufacturers, when people have been tinkering and modifying radio equipment for over 50 years now with no ill effects to those corporation's bottom line?
There are a probably more then a dozen way to take any Wifi device and modify them to violate FCC rules that has nothing to do with hardware.
Why isn't it illegal to ship devices in plastic cases that are easily seperated? Wouldn't FCC rules mean that devices need to be shipped in solid blocks of plastic to prevent people from manuplating them?
Why isn't it illegal to ship wifi devices with external antenna hookup that can be tied into a signal booster?
Can Broadcom be sued by the government for making a PCI card that can be hooked into a modified aerial that attenuates the signal past FCC limits?
That's easy to do. Easier for most people to do then something like modifying Linux code and recompiling a kernel.
Exactly right Posted May 1, 2007 16:06 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] It's easy to go down to Radio Shack, buy some capacitors and inductors, and make a circuit that will cause massive interference to any radio station you choose.
Corporations are risk-averse Posted May 1, 2007 19:34 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link] While many of your examples sound unlikely, it is a fact that unlikely-sounding liability suits ARE filed all the time, and many of them go far enough through the legal system to cost a lot of money to defend. Juries tend to be sympathetic to individuals suing corporations, especially if they have suffered some damage (whether or not it's reasonable to attribute the damage to the corporation). Also, there are laws providing for "contributory negligence", or "contributory liability", which allow assigning part of the blame in situations where you might think the plaintiff had clearly done something stupid.
Corporations HATE to be sued; it all comes out of the bottom line. And, corporations that sell millions of instances know that a small penalty can be multiplied by the product run to cause a large penalty.
The net result is that corporations try to avoid anything that could be a problem, to the extent it is feasible to do so.
In the area of radios, there are also FCC requirements that affect what kind of software changes are permitted (as well as hardware issues). The FCC cna make it more difficult or more expensive for a company to certify future products if they have failed to meet regulatory requirements.
Corporations are risk-averse Posted May 1, 2007 20:39 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] >The net result is that corporations try to avoid anything that could be a problem, to the extent it is feasible to do so.
But that's the point... we have decades of data. They *don't* do anything at all to avoid this for common devices, beyond "warranty void if sticker removed". There are a few cases where they do -- the new proprietary car computer hookups, or closed-source wifi drivers, for instance -- but by some coincidence, these are exactly cases where the closed nature gives them other benefits that are irrelevant to whether they can be sued (ability to extract more money from aftermarket repair shops, and allegedly the ability to keep interesting signal processing algorithms secret, respectively).
So your story seems plausible and makes sense as a theory, except it just doesn't seem to fit the data.
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