[Arm-netbook] pyra computer

[Christopher Havel]

Quick post from phone, in my way to bed. Please excuse top-posting and
occasional typos, if present.

I have a proposal for Luke that I think would solve this problem instantly.

Let there be two "levels" of EOMA68. "EOMA68" by itself can be construed
from now on to mean "compatible with the standard in some reasonable way".
Then, /with a separate and distinct but visually similar/ logo - "EOMA68
Certified", which is exactly that.

Anything that can accept an EOMA68 CPU Card (Luke - is that still the right
term for the card with the guts?) is at least EOMA68. That's your
eBay-and-AliExpress bin, as well as where the hobbyists lurk, and everyone
already knows that junk to be questionable at best, so we take advantage of
that and use it for our own purposes.

HOWEVER, we simultaneously make sure that everyone /also/ knows that the
'good stuff' is EOMA68-Certified. If it's not -Certified, then it's not
trustworthy. Will it work? Maybe. We won't guarantee anything and we won't
warranty anything that isn't -Certified. In fact, if we want to be paranoid
and iron fisted - stick something in the license that voids all warranties
if an EOMA68-Certified device is connected to an EOMA68 non-certified
device. That's rude as heck, IMNSHO, but it does the job.

Of course, that's the so called 'Freemium' way of doing things - I friggin
hate 'freemium', it's usually incredibly dishonest - but, hey, maybe we can
do it right.

What say you, Luke? Float it or sink it... ow, my thumbs... g'nite ya'll...

On Feb 15, 2018 12:32 AM, "Jean Flamelle" <eaterjolly at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is also important to note that for all intensive an diy project
> could receive a certification.
>
> Also if you read the first line of that wikipedia article:
>
> "Reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms, also known as fair,
> reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, denote a voluntary
> licensing commitment that standards organizations often request from
> the owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that
> is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard."
>
> Reading between the lines, the point of the "intellectual property" is
> that it is the leverage has over companies. Without patents EOMA is
> only a word and EOMA has no legal authority to stop imitators from
> just using a slightly different word. With a patent however, a
> standards organization can legally issue a cease-and-desist order.
>
> So this brings up the tough question of how can the EOMA standard
> exert any authority without patents?
>
> Also what will motivate companies to hire Luke as a consultant? That's
> important too, am I wrong?
>
> Community support through donations wins Luke a certain degree of
> independence, so Luke won't have to charge many people consultation
> fees and can give advice more-solely based on merit. Here's an
> interesting question though: what motivates people to donate and will
> that scale as more companies gain interest causing Luke to inevitably
> need to train people to act as consultants on behalf of the EOMA
> project? My hope is, yes.
>
> One way to have leverage is for EOMA to become so popular, companies
> without the mark are actively avoided by a significant fraction of the
> population in given places. This is not to be underestimated, because
> food certifications have demonstrated a lot of success with this
> strategy.
>
> However we should also consider:
> The patent system isn't necessarily broken, if we consider the rampant
> abuse to be the result of scammers. We could see copyleft "public
> commons" patents which are licensed openly to the public so long as
> certain rules pertaining to certain morals are followed. Like with GPL
> violations, any member of the public should be able to make a lawsuit
> against a violator of these rules.
>
> With that possibility in mind, abuse could get worse with copyleft
> principles, because rules could be stupid or misguided. FRAND already
> comes into play with that, so there is already an appeals mechanism in
> place against abusive copyleft or open patent licenses (if I
> understand correctly). Perhaps patent courts could expand to judge as
> fair or unfair the rules of an open patent license. Then such
> standards organizations could form around protecting people and
> certain morals, by prosecuting violators of these open patents.
> Ultimately this could easily turn into an extortion racket with people
> living off of legal and consultation fees. Such an organization should
> live solely on donations and only conduct legal cases pro-bono.
>
> This is were things get weird.
>
> Aren't you asking, "wait if you just implied we should consider living
> off of consultation and legal fees immoral extortion, why are you
> defending patents as a form of leverage used by companies who would be
> able to do that extortion.. you look like you're contradicting
> yourself up and down"?
>
> Well, the fact remains the public benefits if the public shares the
> morals being protected. Legal cases write lots of documentation which
> the public might like to read, if well written. The more injustice an
> organization fights this way then the more journalism they have
> necessarily done and the more journalistic documents they can easily
> publish.
> This engineers a service that gratifies donors and will immediately
> stop if the donations also stop, motivating people not to be selfish.
>
> EOMA standards organizations can also thoroughly document (through
> transcripts, or audio or video journalism) what they were consulted
> about and the advice given, so that it becomes easily apparent if they
> were warning a company that they were consulting for about potential
> violations or if they instead ever used consultation fees as a mode of
> extortion.
>
> This mailing list shows EOMA off to a great start in terms open-ness
> and thorough journalistic documentation of everything going on. I
> fully support Luke and this project, and this is why I again draw
> connections between this project and the baby giant company Cloud
> Imperium Games, for their record-breakingly thorough self-journalism.
>
> I know they aren't FLOSS, but we need to be like them.
>
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