6
Votes
Jan 20, 2010 3:04 PM
3 comments
With the introduction of the OpenPC, a new era of freedom has been ushered in. Hardware freedom!
What’s so free about hardware freedom? Not much, as it turns out. The only thing “open” on the OpenPC are the drivers. All the hardware is proprietary, none of it is open spec. Worse still, the open drivers it uses are inferior in many ways to their proprietary counterparts so they perform poorly. All of this comes at a 100+ euro markup for the “effort” that went into finding open drivers.
It looks like the GNU Tax is higher than the Microsoft Tax. But I guess you just can’t put a price tag on freedom. After all, “freedom isn’t free”, right?
Comments
You're being unfair. The next time Ubuntu (I can't actually be bothered to check on the OS in question) is "upgraded," you'll be glad you own those Open Drivers.
It's something to do with ABI incompatibility and unstable APIs, I believe. There's probably a TM for that.
I'm also way too lazy to check this out -- but doesn't the OpenPC mandate KDE?
What happens if I prefer (shudder) Gnome?
OpenPC could be a good think for linux users, their own "mac".
Bullsh*t price with bad hardware, just what linux needs.
Oh and it will STILL break when updating.
I'd actually like for this to be successful, since i want gnome to die a horrible slow death.
You also have to remember that the real cost of Linux comes in when you tell someone, yeah it's free, you just can't use any of the software you like. In this case, you really are telling people it costs more the Windows. Your investment of $5000 in Windows software is no worthless because you chose Linux. Good job.
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