[Discuss] Free Software Foundation's "Respects Your Freedom hardware product certification"

Wed Jan 7 08:50:27 UTC 2015

Hi all.

For my humble understanding of the FSF vision of what should be an hardware
which is-in-touch with a "free" software, the answer is included inside the
GNU-GPL terms and conditions. The GNU-GPL forces anything which is-in-touch
with a GNU-GPL software, to guaranty the freedoms included in the GNU-GPL
terms. As a result, anything which reduce those freedoms are not certified
products regarding the GNU-GPL use. And the requirements of freedom of
GNU-GPL are very high.

Therefore, we may say that: anything which is delivered under TAPR or
CERN-OHL licences, and which allows anybody in any conditions to have free
access to free software embed inside (or on, or delivered with, or
in-touch-with) or to have free access to install a free software, then this
thing have a very hight probability to reach hardware certification of FSF.
BUT, anything which is delivered under TAPR or CERN-OHL licences, but DOES
NOT allow a free access to "its" free software or a free access to install
free software, then this thing might have very low probability to reach FSF
hardware certification.

That is why, as some of you might know, I've began to rewrite an
experimental GNU-GPL clone licence, but for hardware, fully compatible in
both direction with the GNU-GPL licence. I've relaunch the process of this
experimental work in october 2013, that I begun first in 2003. This work is
not finished yet. As soon as it will be possible to shared this
experimental licence work with large number of people I will communicate
this work to you. Currently, I've not find any way to put this on-progress
work on a hosting service which will guaranty both a free opensource
process and absence of proliferation effect. Anyway, from my point of view,
this future experimental GNU-GPL clone licence will only be a tool for
current hardware licence in their process of improvement, instead being a
new licence, in order to avoid a potential negative effects of hardware
licence proliferation.

If relevant for you,

Freely,

Antoine

2015-01-06 13:31 GMT+01:00 Roy Nielsen <amrset at gmail.com>:

> It would be great to have a certification that certifies that the
> _hardware_design_ is also open source.
>
> If the platform is closed source and the firmware is open source is that a
> win for open source?  I say only partially.  It's a nice first step, but to
> be fully open source, the _hardware_design_ must also be open source.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Regards,
> -Roy
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 3:28 AM, Hanspeter Portner <
> dev at open-music-kontrollers.ch> wrote:
>
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA256
>>
>> I just stumbled across the "Respects Your Freedom hardware product
>> certification" [1] by the Free Software Foundation.
>> I was agnostic about that until now. I thought I would post it here if
>> somebody should be interested.
>>
>> I think it is an interesting idea to actually have someone (independent,
>> non-profit) check whether your hardware/firmware is
>> free (or falsly claimed to be...).
>>
>> Compared to the OSH definition [4], it does not seem to define any
>> criteria for the hardware design to be open, but puts its focus
>> on shipped firmware/software. The latter (in contrast to the OSH
>> definition) must be free to pass the certification criteria [2].
>>
>> There is already some certified hardware out there [3].
>>
>> [1] http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom
>> [2] http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/criteria
>> [3] http://ryf.fsf.org/
>> [4] http://www.oshwa.org/definition/
>>
>> Hanspeter
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>>
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