Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 07:50:02PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:21:54AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > My surmise is that we'd need an effort like that, raising $250K, to
> > design and go to full-custom fabrication of an FPLA with fully-open
> > design.
>
> Mine is that one can get useful things done without having to spend
> ridiculous amounts of money, or even any money at all. Yours is that
> you can't. Debian proves you wrong every day.
>
> There is absolutely no reason why any money is needed for this. Design
> the damn thing. Somebody will want to produce it. Manufacturing
> companies would *leap* at the opportunity to make widely desireable
> chips with zero royalty costs.
Manufacturing an ASIC involves NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs
of hundreds of thousands to millions per revision. A manufacturing
company is going to need to see a pretty good market before they
invest that in an open design.
It's not quite the same as getting a run of Debian CDs made for
a dollar each.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
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