https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
i've been working on a strategy to make it possible for people to have more control over the hardware that they own, and for it to cost less money for them to do so, long-term. i've had to become an open hardware developer in order to do that. i believed for a long long time that leaving hardware design to the mass-volume manufacturers would result in us having affordable hardware that we could own. they would make stuff; we could port OSes to it, everybody wins. starting in 2003 and working for almost 2 years continuously on reverse-engineering i got a bit of a rude but early wake-up call where i learned just how naive that expectation really is [1]. example: it took over THREE YEARS for cr2 to reverse-engineer the drivers for the HTC Universal clamshell 3G micro-laptop. for everyone else, that message came through loud and clear with mjg59's android tablet GPL violations list - which he stopped maintaining because it was pointless to continue [2][3]. it was a bit of a slap in the face - a wake-up call which not only debian but every other ARM free software distribution is painfully reminded of on a regular basis when someone new contacts them and asks: "I have hardware {X} bought off of Amazon / Aliexpress, can i run Linux on it" and pretty much every time someone has to spend their time patiently explaining that no, it's not possible, due to the extraordinary amount of reverse-engineering that's required due to rampant and: endemic GPL violations, and even if they could, it's *already too late* due to "Single-Board Computer Supernova Lifecycle" syndrome. shockingly even intel do not really "Get It". not only do they have the arbitrary remote code execution backdoor co-processor [4] in every x86_64 processor since 2009, but in speaking to a member of the intel open source education team at fosdem2016 i learned that intel considers something as trivial as DDR3 RAM initialisation sequences to be "commercial advantage" and this they use as justification for not releasing the 200 lines of code needed... not that it would help very much because of the RSA secret key needed to sign early boot code. we also have the issue of proliferation of linux kernel device drivers: put simply if there are M processors and N "types of products", we can reasonably and rationally expect the number of submissions of device drivers and device tree files for upstream inclusion to be of the order of "M *TIMES* N". with "M" just in the ARM world alone being enormous (over 650 licensees as of 10 years ago) and "N" likewise being huge, this places a huge burden on the linux kernel developers, and an additional burden downstream on you, the OS maintainers, as well. ... would it not be better to have hardware that was designed around "M plus N"? this would stop the endemic proliferation of device drivers, would it not? so this is the primary driving factor behind EOMA68 - to reduce the burden of work required to be carried out by software libre developers, as well as reduce the long-term cost of ownership of hardware for everyone. so after five years i can finally say that the EOMA68 standard is ready, and with the last (and final) revision adding in USB 3.1 it can be declared to have at least a decade of useful life ahead of it. there are NO "options". there will be NO further changes made (which would result in chaos). a modern Computer Card bought 10 years from now will still work with a Housing that's bought today, and vice-versa. if this approach is something that you feel is worthwhile supporting, the crowd funding campaign runs for another 40 days. crowd funding campaigns are about supporting "ideas" and being rewarded with a gift for doing so. they're not about "buying a boxed product under contract of sale". with your support it will be possible to bring other designs and other processors to you later. picking a processor has its own interesting challenges [5] if you have ethical business considerations to take into account, such as "don't use anything that's GPL violating or otherwise illegal". [why *is* it that people think it's okay to sell GPL violating products, even amongst the open hardware community? ethical ends can never be justified by unethical means]. lastly, i'm... reluctant to bring this up, but i have to. *deep breath*. i'm aware that a lot of people in the debian world don't like me. many of you *genuinely* believe that i am out to control you, to tell you what to do, to "order you about". which is nonsense, but, more importantly, rationally-speaking, completely impossible given the nature of free software. we can therefore conclude, rationally, that the conclusion reached by many of you [that i am "ordering you about"] simply cannot be true. after thinking about this for a long, long time, my feeling is that this startlingly and completely overwhelmingly WRONG impression stems from my reverse-engineering background, which, when *accidentally* applied to software libre as a way to predict future outcomes of decisions made across the board by many of you, working individually and tirelessly (and in most cases unpaid), can draw conclusions about possible train-wrecks that are extremely likely to be just around the corner. i can only apologise for having this ability, whilst at the same time not really being fully cognizant of this until very recently, *and* also not really having the communication skills to be effective in getting things across. or being able to work out when it's best to keep quiet and let you work it out for yourselves. it wasn't really until i encountered *two* other well-known software-libre reverse engineers that are having enormous difficulties in their respective communities that i made the connection: reverse-engineers *reverse-engineer the future* with better-than-average accuracy. that's what they do: they beat entropy. so whilst you may not like me, i have a proven track record of staying ahead of the curve and of sticking to ethical principles. i'll do you a deal: you work on the software, i'll bring you the hardware. we'll respect each other's expertise and chosen paths, and take direct responsibility - together - for serving others in an ethical way. l. [1] http://hands.com/~lkcl/linux.phones.html [2] http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/android_tablets/ [3] http://mjg59.livejournal.com/132339.html [4] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/06/15/1835227/intel-x86s-hide-another-cpu-that-can-take-over-your-machine----you-cant-audit-it?sdsrc=rel [5] https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/picking-a-processor --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68