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| Free Hardware Design Resources for the Free Software Community |
About FreeIO.orgWho are we?FreeIO.org is a website dedicated to the cooperative development of free hardware designs, and drivers for them. There is no official organization. There are no papers of incorporation. There are no buildings. There is no paid staff. There is no bank account. FreeIO.org has no assets of its own. There are only volunteers, working on their own time, with their own equipment, and those volunteers can be anywhere, in any country. FreeIO.org was original conceived of and created by Diehl Martin. What is Free Hardware Design? Free hardware design is the design and public release of the designs of useful electronic building blocks, in the forms of documentation, schematics, printed wiring board layouts, programmable logic implementations, and software drivers for them, as both source code and more immediately usable forms. These designs are not freeware, but rather copyrighted and licensed in such a way that they may be improved by other volunteers and potentially incorporated into other designs, under the same rules. The term copyleft is sometimes applied to this concept, where the licensing is designed specifically to keep the original design and any descendants which flow from it available to help the common good. For a more complete explanation of the concept and its implementation, see the Free Software Foundation website. Why is this called Free? The hardware still costs money! The concept is free as in freedom, not free as in free lunch. You are free to build upon any design or implementation you find here, as long as you release your designs and implementations under the same license. There is a potential for cost reduction in that FreeIO.org does not ask for a payment or royalty to use our designs. However, any improvements to the designs or designs which incorporate any part of our designs must also be released under identical terms. See the GNU General Public License for details. What is this site for? There are three primary reasons for this site: 1. The first and best reason is to publicize our efforts, and to encourage volunteers to help out here or in other similar projects; 2. The second reason is to coordinate development efforts of ongoing projects; 3. The third reason is to release designs to the community for use. How can I help financially? We do not accept money. If you are inclined to give, please support the Free Software Foundation. However, if you see that we are not publishing our intermediate or final results using your preferred parts, or in your favorite CAD system format, or drivers for your preferred operating system, it is quite possible that we do not have access to that tool set. The volunteers use what they have available. If you can legally provide long-term access to something we do not collectively have, it might help. Here is a specific example: One of the volunteers has access to the Lattice/Vantis ispEXPERT with Synplicity (base package) for our VHDL development. Thus all of our designs use Lattice/Vantis parts. Without access to the tools from other CPLD/FPGA vendors, we will continue to use only the Lattice/Vantis parts. Lattice was gracious enough to place the VHDL tools with him, and so their parts are designed in. If you are in a position to provide legal access to other tools, please let us know.FreeIO,
FreeIO.org, Flapjack, Cornbread, Grits, Juice, Toast, Donut, and
Biscuit are
trademarks of Diehl Martin.
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