Paul Greidanus wrote:
quoted text
> Aparently difficult and interesting questions don't get answers until 
> they're posted to a list..
>
> [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/DEFANGED which had a name of Open-Hardware.26774DEFANGED-eml]
>
>   
And it would have worked better if I included the actual message:

Hi Richard,

I've been marginally following the discussion on OpenBSD and FSF and of 
the noise related.
I'm curious how you can recomend an OS, like gNewSense that only runs on 
non-free hardware, that
has required non-free software to be used in it's creation?  Every time 
you buy a product from Intel, a portion of that money goes to companies 
like Cadence and Mentor Graphics.  Now this is non-free in a monetary 
sense, but there are also ethical freedom implications.

There are tools that can replace these non-free programs, like gEDA, 
which can be used to build processors and components, like are available 
on opencores.net and opensparc.net. (I don't know about these as far as 
free..)  Currently Ubuntu works on ultraSparc-III, while gNewSense does 
not.  This is telling people that they need to support non-free 
software, to even use your free software recomendations?

I do understand that hardware is more difficult and expensive to copy 
and distriubute then software, but ethical objections should not be 
limited by difficulty.  If there is enough demand for a company to 
produce a "free" system, then the market should provide a company who 
can make money by building this hardware.  The definition of free here 
would be where the hardware is 100% available for download, 
specifications, HDL, design, firmware, everything, and licensed to fit 
with your definition of free.
I've looked briefly, and I was unable to find a reference to this from 
you anywhere, you seem to be satisfied fighting this on the superficial 
immediate code-execution front, and leaving the nested software required 
for hardware creation alone.

Thanks for your thoughts back on this,

Paul