Re: [9fans] Purism laptops

["James A. Robinson" <jimr@highwire.org>]

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On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 8:19 AM,
Andrés Domínguez <andresdju@gmail.com> wrote:
> D​​o they really make open hardware? In what aspect
> is their hardware more open than any other laptop?

Hi,

A summary would bet hat typically the hardware
drivers that are run on a computer come in two possible
forms, either closed source or open source.  A closed
source driver, a binary blob, would have an externally
documented API but nothing telling you what is going
on inside the API to drive the hardware, it's a black box
from our perspective, and of course it's an executable
targeted at a specific OS such as Windows, or on the
rare occasion Linux.

An alternative is open source.  Either the manufacturer
is releasing the source code for the driver or they are
documenting the details of the hardware internals
and making it openly available, so that someone with
motivation can write an open source driver.

So I think that leaves us with three possible states
for the components of a computer:

1. Undocumented hardware, and the manufacturer
releases a black-box binary blob to drive it for a
specific set of operating system.

2.  Fully documented hardware, and someone has
written an open source driver for the hardware. In
some cases this a "white room" situation where one
person signs an NDA in order to get the documents
but are then allowed to release a freely available driver
(I think this is the case with a few driver used in Linux
on the Raspberry Pi).

3. Fully documented hardware and paired with
an open source driver for the hardware from the
manufacturer.

I was having a discussion with someone about a
variant of this issue a month ago.  They planned to
write a driver for a piece of hardware, but the ideal
situation of the hardware specification being available
was not the case.   However, a Linux open source
driver was available, so he thought he'd be able to
examine that and reverse engineer it for Plan 9.

Jim

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