Building freedom friendly hardware

> New Lemote Machines use an AMD graphics card, which requires a binary blob.
> Their BIOS is free, but you can't use 3D with free software until one
> writes a free replacement. ThinkPenguin machines do not have a free
> BIOS, but their graphics card works with free software.

There are more blobs: VGA ROM blob included in their boot firmware, it
contains data and interpreted code used for modesetting; ME, PFP and RLC
microcode loaded by the kernel. The first one (and the last one for
some chips, probably not this one) is required for modesetting, the rest
is needed only for acceleration (2d, 3d, video). If not for the VGA ROM
blob, it would be easy to use it without the microcode and with
unaccelerated graphics (like the old YeeLoongs with acceleration useful
only with old software).

> I think it is currently impossible to write a free replacement for the
> nonfree microcode, without knowing the internals of the graphics
> hardware.

The Nouveau project had some cards, some microcode extracted from the
Nvidia driver and they have reverse engineered the ISAs used and
implemented free generators for such microcode. I don't know how this
could be more difficult in case of Radeon microcode.

The VGA ROM blob is different, it's unused x86 code and some tables of
known formats (accessed by the kernel module). So it might be easier to
replace.

Lemote supports a different solution for this problem: their future
devices will use Loongson 2H as southbridge with a different GPU design.
I don't know more about it.

> It might be better to support free hardware projects such as
> OpenCores and Milkymist that develop freedom friendly hardware.

It would be, although it's very difficult to make it widely available
and practically useful as a replacement for personal computers. And
FPGAs have other software freedom problems.

> I found an artice about (L)GPLed semiconductor cores at:
> http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v25/25HarvJLTech131.pdf
> Unforunately it uses the words “Intellectual Property” and “Open
> Source”.

Seems interesting, although not related to this issue (licenses can
help, but they won't solve the problem of hardware depending on nonfree
software without designing and producing the hardware).

In regards to talking about free software and hardware it is a challenge for various reasons. Everything is dependent on some non-free code. I usually try and phrase it as “free software compatible” or “free software friendly” although even that isn't great. The computers @ ThinkPenguin are all dependent on a non-free BIOS. All the major chipsets though work with free software. It might be better to phrase it like so “compatible with 100% free software distributions”. That would be a bit less confusing as it still leaves open the possibility of dependency on non-free code in other places.

I think the solution to the problems free software users face (that is being dependent on non-free code) is developing awareness and demand for hardware that is least dependent on non-free code. That will give companies incentive.