This would surely be amazing, a laptop that everyone could have, except everyone's could be different. Just imagine the decrease in repair costs if nobody had to have a grip on the market. Also this would convince companies like Apple to open up their products a little bit. GREAT IDEA!
Ideally i would envision this as a completely open from top to bottom; freely cc released cad drawings for the casing (similar to Openmoko's released files) that may be used to extrude the case using a raprep machine, a freely available CPU (such as an openSPARC or the s1 core), components designed for release as opencore components, open graphics project developed video card, freely available firmware.
To pull this off manufacturers would have to be willing release all schematics and programming info for their chips.
Finally the design would have to be built with complete input from the open source community at every stage of development; no closed doors kernel development or sudden back out!
A coreboot bios with a gnewsense payload would be the final touch.
first of all mac is illegal if installed on a PC. and nvidia and ati would never let out an open source driver then it would be possible to have a non sli motherboard to be running in sli mode.
both companies would be blown away by their users but....
this is an amazing idea!! we need something like this but that runs linux and windows at the same time. mabye a combined verion of the os with a rewritten code.
I would buy such a computer in an instant. I've been using Ubuntu for 4 years, and have erased 2 Windows partitions without even booting them up because I couldn't buy a good laptop without it. In addition, I have been stuck with only badly supported sound cards, and sound is very important to me.
Hmm. I guess the idea is good, but, it's rather hard to get companies to join in on the openSource fun. I'd much rather have the choice to get a computer without any preinstalled operating system. Mainly laptops simply because desktop hardware is more available and its fairly easy to build a desktop computer. If you have any sort of interest in computers I recommend building your own. It's not much that you can do wrong actually, only watch out for evil static electricity.
It might be a little fishy having your computer all opened like that. Plus it'd be hard to get by all of this corporate stuff seeing Apple and Microsoft sharing a computer would just be..odd.
This would surely be amazing, a laptop that everyone could have, except everyone's could be different. Just imagine the decrease in repair costs if nobody had to have a grip on the market. Also this would convince companies like Apple to open up their products a little bit. GREAT IDEA!
Ideally i would envision this as a completely open from top to bottom; freely cc released cad drawings for the casing (similar to Openmoko's released files) that may be used to extrude the case using a raprep machine, a freely available CPU (such as an openSPARC or the s1 core), components designed for release as opencore components, open graphics project developed video card, freely available firmware.
To pull this off manufacturers would have to be willing release all schematics and programming info for their chips.
Finally the design would have to be built with complete input from the open source community at every stage of development; no closed doors kernel development or sudden back out!
A coreboot bios with a gnewsense payload would be the final touch.
I agree wholeheartedly.
first of all mac is illegal if installed on a PC. and nvidia and ati would never let out an open source driver then it would be possible to have a non sli motherboard to be running in sli mode.
both companies would be blown away by their users but....
this is an amazing idea!! we need something like this but that runs linux and windows at the same time. mabye a combined verion of the os with a rewritten code.
I would buy such a computer in an instant. I've been using Ubuntu for 4 years, and have erased 2 Windows partitions without even booting them up because I couldn't buy a good laptop without it. In addition, I have been stuck with only badly supported sound cards, and sound is very important to me.
This is a silly idea. Mine is much better.
http://www.wepc.com/vote/view/dream/5293/1_tonne_laptop
Somehow I can't imagine ATI or nVIDIA (and just about every other major company) letting their drivers go open source.
Hmm. I guess the idea is good, but, it's rather hard to get companies to join in on the openSource fun. I'd much rather have the choice to get a computer without any preinstalled operating system. Mainly laptops simply because desktop hardware is more available and its fairly easy to build a desktop computer. If you have any sort of interest in computers I recommend building your own. It's not much that you can do wrong actually, only watch out for evil static electricity.
I second this idea!
useful can be used to teach people how to write software for all the different parts of hardware.
It might be a little fishy having your computer all opened like that. Plus it'd be hard to get by all of this corporate stuff seeing Apple and Microsoft sharing a computer would just be..odd.