I just read a short and interesting article in Free Software Magazine calling on the community to develop free hardware to solve the issue of free software problems when running on proprietary hardware. The problem with this article is that it proposes that we start by building free laptops and desktops. While that would be great, I think its quite unrealistic to expect the volunteer-driven free software development style to create such a large and complex project in a short time.

Instead, I think that the free software community can start small and make a meaningful impact, while learning how to develop any hardware device. A good example is the Arduino project. The Arduino is the free computer that you describe in the article, albeit a very small one. It is based around a 16MHz Atmel AVR ATMEGA8 microcontroller. It only has a USB connection and a bunch of analog and digital I/O pins.

This thing has more processing power than the first computer my family owned in 1986. That one cost almost US$5000, the Arduino costs US$35. You can build one yourself for less than US$10. The whole development environment and libraries are free software, available under the GNU GPLv2 (now that Sun released Java under that license [source]

Yes, its a small start, but there are some very important lessons being learned here. First off, how to create a manufacturing and supply chain for free hardware. That’s already working, you can buy the Arduino readily in North America and Europe. More work is being done along these lines in Colombia, South Korea, and other places.

Also, just like free software is architected and built in a very different manor than proprietary software from giant companies, free hardware is developed in a very different manor than hardware designed and built by giant companies. So that means we should not be purely thinking of imitating the models we see in the proprietary hardware world. Instead we need to find which models work best for free hardware.