Yea- I wasn't trying to say that there were no free software devices before
this. That would be utterly wrong. They weren't designed to be free maybe,
but I wasn't even trying to say that. The Beagle Bone Black is a bit less
complicated than a laptop, tablet, or cellular device and of these types of
devices freedom hasn't really ever been a high priority for any prior
successful project for which was designed from the ground up. And when I say
success I mean we can see people beyond RMS and a few hackers in the
community with said devices. I'd put single board computers like the BBB,
Banana Pi, and Cubie Board in a similar category with routers, wifi adapters,
and similar. A laptop on the other hand has multiple different components
that are problematic [and actually probably more recent single board
computers]. The same is true for tablets and cell phones.
There is a difference between a device that was designed with freedom in mind
and a device that is freed later too. With EOMA68 we can work toward
designing devices that are free from the start as opposed to having to start
with a design that isn't free and work toward making it freer. None of this
means that a device designed from the ground up to be free will be free, but
it'll at least be as free as is possible within the realm of which it can be
achieved given the conditions of the day. So for example if we have control
over the computer cards we can choose to utilize a SOC that we can get the
maximum level of source code for and then utilize that in computers/housings.
For example. While we could focus on free'ing a chromebook it would make more
sense to design a chromebook-like device around EOMA68 such that we don't
need to utilize the 802.11ac wifi chips or graphics components. We may still
need to free an 802.11ac wifi chip long term, but it's not going to hold us
back in the mean time from having faster modern computing devices.
And certainly it is true that the EOMA68 project would not have succeeded had
we targeted just free software enthusiasts. All of this was factored into the
equation. Fortunately very successfully.
