I grew up on welfare and in public housing, so we used refurbished ThinkPads and the CDs in Linux magazines for our computing at home not because we were savvy, but because it was the best bang for buck at the time. These days, I'm still not super savvy, but I'm still using a refurbished ThinkPad and Linux as my daily drivers. It's almost a principle thing, at this point.
But I've been trying to get more tech-savvy recently, and not just as far as computers go. Made a post a few hours ago about my ideas for getting into microscopy - this citizen/democratization of science stuff is right up my alley for the same reason free/open source/libre software is. One of my future projects would be something like this, which has this bit:
A top-end version would cost a couple of hundred pounds to produce, and would include a microscope objective and an embedded Raspberry Pi computer.
Just the other day, I listened to RMS' talk about copyright vs community, and he mentions not using Raspberry PI. Sure, I could be convinced. You go the FSF page or the Libreplanet page on SBCs, and the options are slim. Shit, for hardware, in the smartphone section, they're still pushing the Nokia 8110 4G Dual SIM. Maybe not too up-to-date on the hardware front, their SBC page seems to be updated every 3-5y. You dig around a bit on Reddit, and you have some good-sounding alternatives - HiFive, Pine64.
But I'm shaky on how ethically solid they are - can't really look to the FSF for guidance there, and more & more people say you can't look to the FSF too much, in general. From where I'm standing, good points all around. But I can't wait for the Libre Silicon folks to catch up, so I need a crash course in the ethics of...whatever we're calling "hardware and software that the user controls, not the producer." I got a stew of terms for this stuff - free, FOSS, libre, open source, right to repair - and no clue how they all gel together. Skim through people talking about GPL/copyleft vs MIT vs Apache licenses, none of that means anything to me. So if you got overviews of the situation today, or a good reading list to get my head around this stuff, I'd appreciate it.
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