On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 02:13:53PM -0600, Kenneth Pronovici wrote: > 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. > > I think what you're forgetting (or at least ignoring) is that designing > hardware is not exactly like designing software. The process is > similar, yes, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. At the > least, this is because testing your hardware "implementation" is not > "free" (as in beer). Any commercial software company will tell you exactly the same thing about software: testing is not free. We're *still* here. Consider why this works (without resorting to things which are obviously not true, like "current hardware doesn't ship with (many) known bugs", or "proprietary software is more reliable"). > I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, just realistic. I think that you > should be careful not to underestimate these fairly significant > differences between hardware and software. I think you're "underestimating" the difficulty of creating software. The difference is merely that you happen to be familiar with a more effective way to do it. Your point is quite amusing because historically any commercial organisation would have told you the exact opposite: Software is far more expensive to produce than hardware, by several orders of magnitude. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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