Most of you have probably heard of the OpenMoko, a phone that is completely “open” from the software being open-source to the hardware being easily hackable, but many of you may not have heard of two similar recent announcements. First, the Open Graphics Project recently announced that their ODG1 open-source graphics card is now available for developers. The idea behind this card is similar to the idea behind OpenMoko – design a piece of equipment that has fully-documented hardware and runs on completely open-source software. Similarly, VIA has just announced their OpenBook laptop/UMPC. Here VIA has released CAD files of the case-design and, naturally, the laptop is Linux-compatible.

So what does this new “open hardware” mean for the future? I think open hardware has the potential to set a gold standard for Linux-compatible hardware. If you think about it, proprietary drivers seem to cause problems. They cannot, generally, be distributed with the distribution, making out-of-the-box support limited, and when there is a bug we just have to hope the manufacturer fixes it eventually. On the other hand, the Linux community does a great job of making sure that hardware with open-source drivers works really well out of the box or with just a few clicks. So, logically, when a device, be it a laptop or a graphics card or a phone or anything, is completely open, it should work incredibly well with Linux. My hope is that, eventually, it will be possible to use only “open” hardware and avoid any company that does not fully support Linux and open-source. Then other hardware manufacturers will be forced to either create their own open hardware or ignore Linux users, something that is getting harder and harder to do.

If this open hardware trend continues, it will set a gold standard for Linux support that other hardware makers will have to meet.