HACKER Q&A
📣 pabs3

How to fund an organisation for open source hardware support?


The world needs a well-funded organization that does the work needed to enable open source operating systems to run on consumer devices. Enterprise device vendors are currently incentivized to add open source support to open source server operating systems, since open source is popular among technologists. Open source operating systems are much less popular on consumer devices (such as routers, phones, tablets, TVs, cameras, robot vacuums, washing machines, fridges, scanners, printers, cars, voice assistants etc) so their vendors have little to no incentive to properly support open source on their devices. Every year a multitude of new consumer devices are released that need supporting.

The work that is needed falls into several categories: helping hardware vendors support open source, security research and exploit development, reverse engineering proprietary hardware support, writing new hardware support based on that and cleaning up vendor forks for mainline inclusion.

Once the initial hardware support is available then tinkerers can work on user interface and other projects that enable other folks to make use of the hardware.

How would you fund such an organization?


  👤 fsflover Accepted Answer ✓
Relevant organizations exist already. See Purism[0], Thinkpenguin [1], Technoethical [2].

[0] https://puri.sm

[1] https://www.thinkpenguin.com/

[2] https://tehnoetic.com/


👤 jayp1418
Buy hardware vendors which supports open source hardware development.. for eg. Purism, system76 ..