GTA04A3 Early Adopter boards in final production test stage

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 28.09.2011 um 09:20 schrieb Timo Juhani Lindfors:

> "Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller" <hns at goldelico.com> writes:
>> 	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCjM48BqfYo
> 
> Interesting! However, I couldn't help noticing: seeing the non-free OS X
> (?) here makes me bit nervous.

Well, we can simply not expect that we can make everything "free"
and with "free" tools only.

The production machines use ... something that starts with a big "W". 

The chips we use, are designed with some unknown non-free
VHDL tools. The courier service finally delivering the components
or units uses some servers for the tracking information we don't have
control about.

My attitude is: don't be fundamentalistic with "freedom" but focus on 
"free and open software" (and information exchange).

The goal of the GTA04 is to support free and open software better as
any other portable hardware you can get. And this is independent from
using non-free tools during design and production. If we rule out to work
with any non-free tool, we can't even start.

So we use non-free tools where it is the best decision to bring
forward the project. If the project becomes successfull, we can
think about replacing more and more of those non-free components
and tools.

But this is IMHO the second step.

BTW, we plan to put the tester software under GPL (which is not
forbidden for OSX application software).

BR,
Nikolaus