[Discuss] EOMA68 Libre Hardware Standard and Libre Software project, currently crowd-funding (deadline expires 26th aug 2016)

[lkcl .]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:16 PM, Marcin Jakubowski
<marcin at opensourceecology.org> wrote:

> Thanks, good points of clarification.

 no problem, man.  ah!  i got a _great_ example.  it's very simple:
you know how a "lobster pot" is open? :)

 that's what "open source" is.  it's an insidious trap from which
there's no escape once you're in.  by contrast, "libre" provides a
*guarantee* that you can "escape the lobster pot" (which is why the
FSF and many people were extremely pissed off with the purism "librem"
laptop).

 now, that's not to say that the OSHWA's documentation are not an
extremely good and extremely necessary idea: the similarities to what
i learned from developing the EOMA hardware standards is startling.

 here's the key differences:

(1) through the tough lessons of the past five years in developing the
EOMA68 standards, i had people actually try to take control of it for
their own purposes, making statements that they were NOT AUTHORISED to
make, bringing the standard into disrepute and, by making promises of
changes that would make it ambiguous instead of a guaranteed, trusted
simple upgrade path, actually risked destroying the standard in its
entirety.  i had to take them to task, it wasn't fun, but it was
important to do so.

 (2) i've *actually developed* hardware based on the standard, and
have adapted the standard accordingly.  so i've had opportunities for
feedback to check its integrity.  it's really really important (as the
dog's dinner known as the 96boards standard shows) *not* to finalise a
standard until you've been through some iterations and got some *real*
feedback.

 (3) Certification Marks (the "standards" equivalent of "Trademarks")
are really *really* important.  by the very fact that the OSHWA
document exists, there is *already* a Certification Mark on it... it's
just an "unregistered" one.  once the issues with the use of the words
"open source" are fixed i strongly recommend getting a "registered"
Certification Mark.

 (4) nowhere in the OSHWA document do i see the (very real)
possibility described or covered of people being harmed (or killed) by
people who implement (so badly that it causes death or injury) an
OSHWA Certified product.  this is *unbelievably* important to cover as
part of the Certification process.  the problem for the creators of
the OSHWA document will be if they *don't* have a procedure in place
to deal with this unfortunate eventuality, as the family and/or estate
of anybody who is killed by an OSHWA-Cerfified product, rather than go
after the individuals who used the Certification blithely and with
blatant disregard for human life, they'll come after YOU instead.  yes
these things really do need to be discussed and taken into
consideration.

l.