Purism on creating an SBC

[lkcl]

@nicole.faerber

The question is rather, what would a Purism SBC bring to the table what e.g. a recent Raspberry Pi does not?

well, speaking hypothetically, based on what i know of Purism, i would imagine that closed source binary blobs for boot BIOS, drivers and firmware for accelerated functions would not be tolerated. consequently, all Audio, Video, 3D GPU, cryptographic and all other functions would be entirely Libre driven with full source, giving no opportunity for DRM lockin or spying backdoors.

on top of that base, customers and engineers could develop and debug complex applications, with less time less money and less risk.
you’ve no doubt seen this article and understand its significance
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Intel-and-Valve-collaborate-to-develop-open-source-graphics-drivers-1649632.html

@StevenR

What we really need is for a chip maker to release a fully FSF compliant SOC to the market, complete with all required documentation.

this has been my goal since 2012. search for “towards an FSF endorseable processor”. currently LibreSOC http://libre-soc.org

you can actually get SoCs that are considered FSF Endorseable: some of Beagleboard products (OMAP3525), and some based on the Ingenic jz4775, the problem being: they’re all 10+ year old technology that was anemic even when they came out, due to simply not having accelerated (closed source) accelerated RTL Blocks in the first place. with anemic performance and capabilities nobody wants to buy them, not even FSF supporters.

@StevenR

I can see the potential for a day (at least I’ll keep dreaming) where perhaps myself, an IC architect, and an IC designer (people I already know well enough to pitch semi-radical ideas to) may get up enough courage to walk over to that table

i didn’t wait. i got fed up. so i put in an NLnet Grant request and was amazed when they accepted it, put in some more and they accepted those too: you can help out if you like, there is a lot to do. don’t wait for permission: just do it.

@StevenR

Some day, some SOC manufacturer somewhere needs to sit down with Todd and his team and say “give us your wishlist. If we were to build exactly what you need, exactly what would that look like?”.

funny that. i sent pretty much exactly that, about 90 minutes ago

@StevenR

I think that the intent of the LibreSOC is good. Most of those who are capable of contributing to that work may be tied to contracts with their respective employers as I am

as Libre contributors and independent developers we own the copyright on what we do. we choose to release it under the LGPLv3. however it should be easy to convince the company that you work for that allowing you to do that is in their best interests. it is pretty standard practice for contributors to Libre projects to personally own thr copyright, and Jeremy Allison made the case pretty clear.

@StevenR

If you as the manufacturer own the silicon product and all rights to manufacture and distribute it, why not give away all firmware required to drive it?

it always stuns me that manufacturers try to sell “information about product” rather than “product”. make it easy to use for gid’s sake!

@kieran

The market leader, the Pi, sets the standard and the standard for price is low .

it may surprise you to learn that the SoC is not the major cost. Allwinner A64 plus PMIC: $4. 8GB eMMC: around $5. 2GB DDR3 RAM: around $7. PCB: $2. Connectors: appx $2. Discretes: around $2 when you start to add high current inductors and capacitors.

Having a $15 SoC rather than a $4 SoC increases the BOM by say 25%? which honestly isn’t a lot. Basically the RAM and eMMC is the larger cost, particularly when you crank up to larger sizes.