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We need more opensource hardware (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/cybersecuritymemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It won't. Nothing stops companies from open-sourcing their hardware and firmware already.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well RISCV changes a bit the paradigm. With x86 x64 or arm whatever the manufacturers had to pay a licence and sign a contract that limited what they could manufacture and probably didn't allow for disclosure of information. Only licenced partners could build their own chips based on those architectures.

    With RISCV is different, there's no licence for manufacturing RISCV chips, anybody can do it. No contract needed.

    Arduino is an example of that. They used their own MCU and gave it free "libre", that's why there're so many arduino copies that are just the same.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    When you buy an ARM from ST or Espressif, the license is already paid for. We have no shortage of ARM on the market or every other non-arm chips on the market.

    Changing to RISC-V should theoretically lower the price to comparable ARM chips because there is no license to pay, but the buck stops there.

    If a company develops a product with a RISC-V chip, they can still create a walled product. The underlying chip architecture does not prevent a company from being a dick.

    The Atmel Atmega/AVR is just an old architecture from before ARM became widespread. And Arduino is a project that streamlined code loading onto a chip to make creative art more accessible to non-technical people and caught on. It could have been done on Microchip PIC or the Texas Instrument MSP, both widespread architecture at the time.

    What I am trying to say is that we have plenty of hardware to do pretty much anything that we want and the issue of open hardware/firmware is on the companies that create the products and not the chips from the manufacturers.

    Edit: Espressif is not ARM based.

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