You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly,
I suspect the war has already been lost.
No way! We're FINALLY seeing an uptick in the open hardware front. Open hardware like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards, as well as a ton of new IoT startups (like Spark and their Photon), and the bevy of open sensors (like Grove's) are drastically lowering the barrier to entry for hardware tinkering and even garage-style production. Just check out Seeedstudio's online shop to see how many different hackable hardware options we now have.
For $20 you can buy a WiFi "kit" that you can plug an array of $10-20 sensors onto. That opens up A LOT of doors for people to either create budget hardware products to sell, or for inexperienced home users to piece devices together. If wifi/gps/gsm chips and sensors can be plugged together like Legos, and if software can be "beamed" to it from their Phone, then you now have a perfect breeding ground for cheap, open hardware products available to the masses.
I look on to the next 5 years with nervous excitement; I myself have even begun planning a cheap cloud storage device using nothing but an RPi, external hardrives, and a few parts from Newegg that I can assemble in a couple minutes. That's an open replacement for Apple's TimeCapsule that anyone could put together in 10 minutes if a kit of the parts were sold to them.
Yea I totally agree. What I described requires no third-party hosted service, though. In my particular example of the cloud storage device, I use Pulse for file sync and GPG/rsync to upload archives to Amazon Glacier. None of that is closed source or involving any third-party.
You mean "like Olimex A20 Olinuxino which has the same form factor of the Raspberry Pi but unlike the latter is open hardware and runs on open source software only", right?
You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software.
That seems pretty far from "open hardware". True that likely any similar project requires closed source drivers for things like the EC/embedded controller, 3D acceleration, and maybe the 802.11 chip, but at least you can choose to boot and use the system without support for the closed devices.
> You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software.
I thought that this was no longer necessary[1], but after searching around I'm not sure if this means it is possible to boot without the blob. Does anyone know if this is the case?
For $20 you can buy a WiFi "kit" that you can plug an array of $10-20 sensors onto. That opens up A LOT of doors for people to either create budget hardware products to sell, or for inexperienced home users to piece devices together. If wifi/gps/gsm chips and sensors can be plugged together like Legos, and if software can be "beamed" to it from their Phone, then you now have a perfect breeding ground for cheap, open hardware products available to the masses.
I look on to the next 5 years with nervous excitement; I myself have even begun planning a cheap cloud storage device using nothing but an RPi, external hardrives, and a few parts from Newegg that I can assemble in a couple minutes. That's an open replacement for Apple's TimeCapsule that anyone could put together in 10 minutes if a kit of the parts were sold to them.