Open Hardware collective develops single-board computer
Orchestration
The KDE Vivaldi tablet isn't here yet, but its development team is proposing cooperative businesses and open hardware as the future of free software.
Remember Vivaldi [1] (a.k.a. Spark), KDE's tablet? Announced about two years ago, it has been delayed several times since, as those producing it learned the hard realities of hardware manufacture. Vivaldi should finally arrive in 2014, but, meanwhile, the effort put into it has had two results: what KDE Plasma developer Aaron Seigo calls a "cooperative brand" and Improv [2], an engineering board intended to help develop a hardware industry for devices compliant with the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Both Vivaldi and Improv are products of Make Play Live [3]. Originally created to build Vivaldi, Make Play Live has evolved into an organization that consists of small companies that pool their expertise to produce and market commercial products that would be beyond the scope of any one of them [4]. These efforts are coordinated by Coherent Theory LC, described in the list of Partner Network members as "caretaker of the Make·Play·Live brand," which includes an adherence to Make Play Live's philosophy [5] and commitments [6], both of which are firmly grounded in free software.
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