tobias_platen's blog

I love Free Software – and Free Hardware Designs

For many years I have been using free software. I remember that one of my first GNU programs that I used was a chess game, ported to 16bit Windows. Many years later I switched to GNU/Linux and started programming myself, and also releasing my software under strong copyleft licences. I also discovered that many popular distros of GNU/Linux include non-free firmware. So I began contributing to GNU Guix, a fully free distro of the GNU System that excludes nonfree firmware blobs, nonfree games, and any other nonfree software.

Unfortunately many hardware vendors, including AMD, NVIDIA and Intel starting making their hardware Defective By Design, by implementing HDCP, a kind of hardware-level Digital Restrictions Management. Even if you never watch Netflix, you will be restricted by the non-free firmware, required to use their CPUs and GPUs. If we want to eliminate that form of hardware-level DRM, we will have to design our own Freedom-Respecting hardware. A few years after I baught my Talos II, I began contributing to the Libre-SOC project.

After switching to the POWER9, it was clear that I would not be able to play the nonfree DRM’d games that Valve distributes on their platform Steam. And I didn’d want to either. So I started porting existing free software games to the ppc64el architecture, including VR games such as V-Sekai and BeepSaber. I discovered that there was a libre-licensed SteamVR clone called libsurvive that implements libre licensed lighthouse-based tracking. So I baught my Valve Index, installed libsurvive and started playing with Godot4.

Today is 愛 ♥ Free Software Day 2023, which aims at raising awareness to Free Software and the passionate, hard-working people behind it. So I want to thank Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton who started the Libre-SOC project and Charles Lohr for their work on libsurvive. Last year the FSFE had an event dedicated to Free Software games, where we played Veloren, a libre licenced voxel game. The game was really fun, so I want to show my appreciation for their work. The same is true for SlimeVR/monado and Yosys/nextpnr. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️💛🤍💜🖤

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2023 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.