Venus Project Open Transition - Help Wanted
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Eric Mossotti
Mar 21, 2012, 6:01:12 PM3/21/12
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Eric Mossotti <edapt...@gmail.com> wrote:
The Venus Project needs experienced people to volunteer some time, regarding possibly transitioning into the Open Community..
www.thevenusproject.com
www.tvpactivism.com
I have been discussing this in a thread (link below), and am to the point that people who have done open projects, or related things, need to input into this. I have done a bit of research and am needing anyone who can possibly have some correspondence with me and maybe show how things will be handled if the choice is made to go Open with past, present, and/or future works and projects.
http://tvpactivism.com/en/community/groups/viewdiscussion/84-open-licensing-tvp-copyrights?groupid=175
I think this volunteer organization is very much aligned by default, by definition, with the Open and Free Software and related movements, however the person who started this is in his mid 90s now, is still alive and well for his age, but doesn't know about these things. I am trying to bridge the gap between us and the all encompassing open developments that are growing worldwide.
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 7:08 AM, <openmanu...@googlegroups.com> wrote:Group: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/topics
- Program your own open source FPGA SoC, Thursday 29th March, London (UK). [1 Update]
- "all people should have access to enabling technologies" [1 Update]
Andrew Back <and...@carrierdetect.com> Mar 20 06:04PM
Hello,
Any folks in or around London (UK) and with an interest in open source
chip design and/or FPGA technology may be interested in the OSHUG
meeting taking place next week. Details posted below.
Cheers,
Andrew
--
OSHUG #17 — Practical System-on-Chip (Program your own open source FPGA SoC)
29th March 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration,
16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049, -0.116436)
// Sponsored by DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com //
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/17
At the ninth OSHUG meeting we were given an introduction to FPGA
development, and to the OpenCores community and the OpenRISC 1000 open
source processor family. At the seventeenth OSHUG meeting we will be
given a comprehensive introduction to the practicalities of
programming your own open source FPGA system-on-chip.
— How to Program Your Own Open Source FPGA System-on-Chip
It is possible to buy a FPGA prototyping board like the Terasic
DE0-nano, capable of running a complete 32-bit System-on-Chip for
around £50. Even larger boards with the memory capacity to bring up a
full Linux system on the design cost a few hundred pounds.
In this talk Julius Baxter and Jeremy Bennett will present the
OpenRISC architecture and OpenRISC Reference Platform SoC (ORPSoC),
and show how to take this open source design and get it running on an
FPGA board.
This is a practical evening, aimed at users who have never done any
chip design. Using a Xilinx ML501 prototyping board, Julius Baxter
will demonstrate all the steps from obtaining the initial hardware
design through to bringing up the board and booting a full Linux
system.
The following topics will be covered:
* an overview of OpenCores and the OpenRISC project
* an introduction to the Verilog Hardware Design Language
* how to synthesize the design into a FPGA bitstream
* what needs modifying to run on different boards
* how to get software running
* porting a simple (newlib) library to the board
* demonstration of Linux booting
// Note that this will be an interactive session, and participants are
encouraged to bring their along own FPGA dev boards and laptops and to
join in, should they wish. If you have a board that is not listed as
having a preconfigured ORPSoC build, or you have any other questions
concerning the practicalities of this, you should direct your question
to the OSHUG discussion list. //
Julius Baxter has been involved with the OpenRISC project for 4 years,
and during that time he's worked on everything from processor Verilog
RTL to the Linux kernel port. After finishing undergraduate studies in
his native Australia, he then studied a System-on-Chip design Master's
at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, while working at ORSoC AB - the owners
and operators of OpenCores.org. Now living and working Cambridge,
Julius maintains a role as an active developer and maintainer on the
OpenRISC project, largely dealing with RTL, toolchain and architecture
work.
Dr Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm which provides open
source services, tools and models to facilitate embedded software
development with complex systems-on-chip. He has been involved with
OpenCores for the past decade, and is responsible for much of the
software tool chain. Contact him at jeremy....@embecosm.com.
Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start
at 18:30 prompt.
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/17
--
Andrew Back
http://carrierdetect.com
Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> Mar 20 11:41AM -0500
From: Reece Arnott <reece....@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 4:09 AM
Subject: [reprap-dev-policy] Discuss: "all people should have access to
enabling technologies"
To: reprap-d...@lists.reprap.org, Dunlug <dun...@lists.ethernal.org>,
dunedin-m...@googlegroups.com, pp...@googlegroups.com
Cc: HCI List <h...@waitaki.otago.ac.nz>
Background
========
I have been doing a PhD and have come to the point of writing up the
Motivation section describing why I'm doing what I'm doing. At the same
time I watched the video http://vimeo.com/36579366 by Brett Victor titled
"Inventing on Principle" and it got me thinking (the got me thinking part
starts around 34 minutes 30 seconds into it and I highly recommend you
watch it).
This lead me to try and articulate what has been the "guiding principle"
that has lead me to get involved with various groups with strong
ideological identities: namely the Reprap project (reprep.org), Open Source
Software in general via the local Linux Users Group, the local Makerspace,
and the local Pirate Party political party. The following is the outcome of
this, reformatted slightly for email, that I am sending to the email lists
of these various groups to stimulate discussion.
Does this hold together do you think?
Motivation
=======
During the last decade I have gradually come to the realisation that a
guiding principle for my life is “all people should have access to enabling
technologies”. This makes the inherent moral and value judgement that
enabling technologies are good for society and that more good is created
when more people have access to them. It follows therefore that it is my
obligation to use the resources at my disposal to pursue this goal and
break down any barriers that may hinder ordinary people from accessing
enabling technologies.
The phrase “enabling technologies” is used here to mean “the tools used to
make tools” and is defined in this purposely vague way to describe a
continuum. It is not supposed to be used to group technologies into those
that are “enabling” and those that are “not enabling”. Rather it is used to
focus attention on what is important when comparing technologies. It gives
a useful guideline as to a way to rank two technologies as to which is more
valuable to society based on the potential uses of its end-products rather
than on what it can do in and of itself. There are limited resources that
can applied to technologies, so effort should be put into making the more
enabling technology available to society at large by lowering barriers such
as cost, specialised knowledge, or skills, and, in the case of immature
technologies, having resources invested in making these technologies
better. This leads to a few conclusions as to where effort should be spent
in hardware, software, and even in the realm of pure ideas.
In hardware it may be relatively easy to rank two products, for example
furniture is less important on this scale than a common workshop tool such
as a file. Similarly, and not surprisingly, a fully equipped workshop is
more important than any of the individual tools that make up the workshop.
In the same way, as additive manufacturing can make a superset of items
that subtractive manufacturing can make, a 3D printer is potentially more
valuable than a fully equipped workshop with standard subtractive tools.
Hence my interest in a low cost 3D printer for the masses.
[If you don't know the difference between additive and subtractive
manufacturing see below where I've pasted in another section of the
introductory section of my PhD]
With software, the differentiations can be harder to make but the guiding
principle leads to the conclusion that software developed using the
philosophies of the Free/Libre/Open Source communities is more valuable
than the equivalent proprietary version of the product. When ranking two
essentially identical software applications, if one of the applications is
available for no cost with a permissive license and one has a licence fee
and a restrictive licence, the former is more valuable to society in
general. Software that allows the user to see the source code is more
valuable than software that does not. Software that gives the user the
ability to use the source code in a different context is more valuable than
if it did not.
In the realm of pure ideas, whose only instantiation is the recorded word,
there is normally no way to make a forecast as to how one idea will
influence another, so access to more ideas is a social good and barriers
restricting access to these ideas should be minimised. Therefore publishing
in open access journals is better than in those that require a fee to read
and legislation that puts more works into the public domain is better than
legislation which increases the reach or length of copyright. This has lead
to my involvement with the political process in a small way by becoming a
member of the Pirate Party of New Zealand to help instigate legislative
change. As one of the founding members of the party said, when summarising
the Pirate Party position in a private conversation, “Access to information
should not be dependent on the size of your wallet”.
This also changes the oft-maligned mantra “information wants to be free”,
which could be considered to have connotations of inevitability and induce
a passive longing for the future. A more active wording would be
“information should be free” which is inherently a moral judgement and a
call to action i.e. society would be better off if this were the case but
it will require work to get there. Because of the moral judgements that
come from this guiding principle, this document is hereby released into the
public domain and the source code created in this project is released under
a GPL license. For original source code the GNU General Public Licence
version 3 (GPLv3) is used, with any modifications also required to be
released under the same licence or, at the modifiers discretion, any later
version. Where the software is a modification of a pre-existing piece of
software which was licensed under a previous version of the GPL, the
modified source may have been released under the same licence if the
original authors did not provide for modifications to be licences under
later versions.
As the Reprap project is an open source hardware and software project to
create a low-cost 3D printer it is a project that is already well along
this continuum and deserving of my time and skills to participate in it. My
skill-set is not necessarily one that can best be used in helping the
project directly so I rather looked at the potential barriers that would
stop people making the best use of a Reprap 3D printer and I found what I
consider to be a hurdle: the use of a 3D printer is limited to printing out
those things that you have a 3D computer model of and creating these models
is hard, especially if you want to duplicate a real world object.
Extra Additive vs. Subtractive Manufacturing details
==============================**==
Manufacturing techniques of physical objects can be divided into two
categories: additive and subtractive. As their names imply, additive
techniques create value by starting with nothing and carefully adding to it
whereas subtractive starts with a resource and adds value by removing parts
from it. The primary manufacturing technique throughout history has been
subtractive and the tools available in the standard home workshop reflect
this from a simple file, to a lathe, to a CNC (Computer Numerically
Controlled) Router. Additive techniques have been fairly primitive until
relatively recently and were normally simply the joining of multiple parts
that were themselves made with subtractive techniques.
In general, an object that is considered to be complex to manufacture today
is deemed to be so because it is required to be made from multiple parts
that need to fit together in a precise manner, such as a gearbox, or
because more material has to be stripped away compared to a less complex
version, such as an ornately carved piece of furniture. With mature
additive manufacturing techniques this is not necessarily the case. This
can be summed up in the pithy statement, seemingly attributable to Scott
Summit (e.g. http://news.cnet.com/8301-**13772_3-10464828-52.html<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10464828-52.html>),
that with additive manufacturing “complexity is free”. In fact, in a lot of
cases, for example that of purely aesthetic features such as ornate
patterns on the surface of an object, the cost of this additional
complexity may even be negative as less raw material is used and the piece
will be completed faster compared to the less ornate version.
--
-------------------------
Reece Arnott
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand
-------------------------
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--
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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