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

lkcl . luke.leighton at gmail.com
Mon Aug 22 18:59:48 UTC 2016


On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Marcin Jakubowski
<marcin at opensourceecology.org> wrote:
> Come after "YOU" - the YOU refers to people who drew up the OSHWA standard?

 .... yeah.  sorry that wasn't clear, but yes, sadly.  the argument
used would probably go something like, "you just let people sign up to
this without actually checking their credentials" - that would show a
chain of culpable negligance and possibly even open up the people who
drew up the OSHWA standard to charges of 3rd degree manslaughter.

 now, whether that's actually true or not would be irrelevant to any
people who were in stages of grief / shock /
looking-for-someone-to-blame, so it's something that really needs to
be thought through.

 the way that i'm dealing with it is: you don't get an "automatic
signup".  you have to go through a Certification process.  people who
are doing commercial (non-libre) hardware would be required to pay,
and those that are doing libre hardware would not.  either case
they'll have to provide working samples for interoperability testing.

 now, it's slightly different for the EOMA standards because it's a
split modular design so it's REALLY important that hardware
interoperability testing and safety checks be carried out, but imagine
the case where somebody slaps an OSHWA label on some
shoddily-assembled hardware with a faulty PSU.  or builts a
battery-charger that has an OSHWA label on it where they've NO IDEA of
the safety issues associated with overheating on lithium batteries.

 i'm really sorry for not knowing of the OSHWA efforts before
otherwise i would have raised these issues during the standard's
development, having had to think them through already for EOMA
standards.

l.


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