What is this thing?
The Q3ube is an AGPLv3 Libre software program which produces a design specification to produce a computing device, and also refers to the computing device itself, which ships with the Q3ube software program. This is the world's first recursive hardware that ships with everything you need to change the design. I could also call it the GNU's not Unix Hardware Platform, but that's just a little too meta.Currently, this is what one might classify as 'vaporhardware', as there's no actual physical design. But the Next Cube and G4 cube, and all those fanless linux boxes out there were once vaporhardware existing only in a mad designer's minds eye.
This vaporhardware currently lives in a mercurial repository and is beginning to take form in cyberspace as a provisional patent, and little bits of this dream may be, if you should be so kind as to allow them, infecting your mind right now with the Q3ube AGPLv3 cyberdefense matrix. Should you wish to join in this task, spread it around, and introduce your friends to the idea of a piece of hardware that comes with the software to let you move a circuit trace on the motherboard, and make another one, or to change the datapath in the core CPU from 32 bits to 42 bits, so that you may compute the answer to the first question.
What you see in the background is the basic dimension of The Q3ube Thermoframe. It is a very effective device for converting otherwise useful electricity into not so useful heat. Just as aircraft have airframes that determine their abilities in the air element, we have a thermodynamic management frame which determines our capabilities in the fire element. The thermoframe manages heat from processing elements with an open-standards form-factor for small, but powerfull destop-replacement class computing platforms, fitting inside a roughly 4" square cube. The initial physical implementation will probably be based on a TI OMAP processor, and include Gigabit Ethernet, 2 USB/esata combo ports, and a DVI/Displayport port.
Eventually, we will reach the point where the OpenCores ASIC will be shipping, and we will have the first physical implementation of a system that is fully specified and manufacturable from the Q3ube software that we hope to ship with the Debian operating system, and which can be designed and modified entirely with software packages existing in the main Debian archive.
We also encourage commercial non-AGPL hardware vendors to make Q3ube-compatible designs, so long as said commercial designs either negotiate a separate license with the Q3ube software authors, or use industry standard clean-room reverse engineering techniques to provide parts interchangable with the Q3ube. Copyright violation will be prosecuted to the full extent applicable by the law. For those copyright and IP parasites and vampires out there, consider this your notice that we will leave you alone if you leave us alone. Resistance creates heat. You will be Libre.
omg send me better css please
Oh, and in response to landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt
(which I found really amusing, btw), I think it is a bit to soon to proclaim the
death of copyleft. I do what I do because I enjoy giving stuff away, and I'll be
happy to charge a huge license fee to anyone who wants to make money taking what
I do, and locking it down or otherwise not giving it away. But it will cost them,
so I can keep giving away the next big thing. (like minco.me,
which is also AGPLv3, if you care to check).
So, for that reason alone, copyleft lives, and it will only die when the
intellectual slavery of IP ownership dies with it, possibly in a hail of mutually
assured legal lawsuit destruction that leaves every company that attempts to claim
ownership of an idea in shattered and broken, like the winter in May.
please send comments, licensing requests, and better html/css to troy at 7el dot us