Products

and the nominees are ...

LinuxBIOS

LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers. It is a Free Software replacement for several motherboard BIOS. http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page. It is not clear if it is ready for general use.

OpenMoko

is a GSM mobile phone that uses GNU and Linux as well as some new Free Software toolkits;
http://www.openmoko.org/

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child)

Although the OLPC computer seems to be available only to third world countries, the design criteria are excellent. Since it meets our criteria, it is included here. See OLPC, OLPC News, or the OLPC wiki.

 Motherboard

The GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 [1] is the first-ever desktop motherboard
supported by a Free & Open Source BIOS, thanks to AMD engineer Yinghai
Lu who released GPL-licensed code. This state-of-the-art motherboard is based on the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI chipset and AMD's latest Socket AM2. Its features include:

Support for AMD Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 processors
2X PCI Express x16 slots
3X PCI Express x1 slots
2X PCI slots
3X 1394a (FireWire) ports
10X USB 2.0
16GB maximum memory
SATA RAID
6X SATA 3Gb/s slots.

This motherboard can be obtained today from many retail and online
stores [2] and the source code for the BIOS can be downloaded from the
LinuxBIOS SVN server [3].  From LKML.ORG

gnewsense

is a Linux distribution (based on Ubuntu), but it tries to clean out any binaries. http://www.gnewsense.org/

BLAG GNU/Linux

is another version of Linux (based on Fedora) that contains only Free Software. http://www.blagblagblag.org/

Graphics Board

Traversal Technology, the Open Graphics Project, and the Open Hardware Foundation are dedicated to the development of free-design hardware, in support of Free Software. Leveraging the power and ingenuity of the Free Software community, we work together to specify, design, test, and build new technology in computer graphics and other fields Traversal Technology, the Open Graphics Project, and the Open Hardware Foundation are dedicated to the development of free-design hardware, in support of Free Software. Leveraging the power and ingenuity of the Free Software community, we work together to specify, design, test, and build new technology in computer graphics and other fields

The Free ECB_AT91 V1

is a Single Board Computer made by emQbit. You can buy one, or download the specs and the PCB and build your own.

A note from Dell.

Chumby

While this product uses open source software and is user modifiable, it includes a license agreement that prohibits blocking advertising.

 


Please let us know of other candidates at info at freeappliances dot org.

These are products which appear to meet our criteria, however we are unable to verify suitability of them for any purpose. In the future we hope to review them fully. caveat emptor.

Home