Open Source Takes on Hardware Biz: When you think “open source,” you always think “software.” Well, a group of developers is extending open source into hardware by developing a chip with freely-available blueprints.
“Hardware has always been very proprietary — even more so than software,” said Lampret in an interview Monday. “But our system-on-chip shows that open-source technology can compete successfully in the hardware space, especially in embedded applications.”
Sadly, the article isn’t terribly positive, as it goes on to state that there are thousands of patents hanging over hardware processes that would make it awfully hard to come up with a viable solution that didn’t violate one of them.
