ASUS Addresses GPL Concerns

If the wireless stuff is proprietary (non-free, as in speech), then why can’t we use it anyway, as we paid for it’s use via the Xandros install/bundle with the Eee PC anyway.

Also the sticker over the RAM and mini PCIe slots, that if broken, seems to be against the law, is ASUS addressing this as well? Hey – this GPL question and any other drivers that LINUX would need, would be good for us that want another Linux version to run. Yep – because… has anyone tried to use the gOS (based on Ubuntu with Enlightenment desktop) with Eee PC yet? gOS seems to use less as far as storage goes? That would make sense as Enlightenment is “billed” as being a bit quicker, using less resources, vs Gnome or KDE ?

You can get the sources here un-RAR’d:

http://sources.sbrio.org/eee/

“Also the sticker over the RAM and mini PCIe slots, that if broken, seems to be against the law, is ASUS addressing this as well?”

Don’t be a fool. Just because it’s not consistent with US law, doesn’t mean Asus was wrong to do it. They ship these units all over the world. It might keep them from having to complete expensive warranty repairs in many countries, even if they have an obligation in the US. Get over yourself.

The GPL requires that source be made available upon request, not that it be publicly posted for anyone and everyone…

The Surf versions don’t have the RAM and PCI-e slots on them, and as far as I know the newer models won’t have the PCI-e slot as well …

Hmmm – that does not sound very good, or neighborly of them, does it?

Is Jonney Shih your neighbor? Didn’t think so. I don’t think he owes you anything unless you’re a shareholder of Asustek, in which case, I think he probably came through for you.

Why doesn’t ASUS want users to modify their units?

I don’t think they care what you do after you pay your entry fee of $399, but they sure as heck aren’t going fix your bricked EEE PC after you worked on it without a grounding strap or proper SMT hot air soldering station.

They will sell more units by making the device as upgrade friendly as is possible!

They aren’t interested in the number of units sold. They are interested in net profit.

What is the ASUS problem with this sticker and we want to “control our users ” type of mentality?

The problem is not with Asustek but with non-entrepeneurial sheeple who don’t understand how business works.

Tinkering with the first generation Asustek 701 PC is fun and the computer is pretty revolutionary as the first fairly successful non-Microsoft OS powered computer in some time. Don’t kid yourself, however, into thinking that the 701 PC was designed as some hippie “information wants to be free” experiment.

Red Menace
The original IBM PC, that I still have in the attic, was a success over the Apple products… in part, due to the fact that it was upgrade capable, folks had control of the future of the product, without having to get IBM parts to do it. I remember having to replace a 180KB Floppy Drive, price of IBM part at dealer was over $900, price at PC Connection was about $100 and they would help me with the install over the phone if I needed to have the help. It turns out that all the plugs fit in only one place, could not mess it up… easy to do. Compaq computer came out with the big brick mobile computer as their first computer (kinda of a red screen), everyone else followed… a knock off of the IBM bios (reverse engineered) the rest is history. I had a original IBM PC with turbo boards, a 286 processor on a board plugged into the orginal 8088, 2MB of RAM with RAM disks, etc… and in the end, we had Citrix ICA terminal session running on it, with a NT4 GUI on an original IBM PC. Funny, but it was used where I worked then, for years.

The reason why ASUS exists is because the original IBM computer design was not proprietary to IBM, it was not because Microsoft wrote the software! The IBM PC hardware, was upgrade capable without needing ORIGINAL IBM parts to do it. Everyone else jumped in and made parts and the excitement exploded about a product that was CPU wise, inferior to the Radio Shack/Tandy TRS 80 and the Apple machines succeeded because people were FREE to play with it and others could make money in this business, not just IBM. ASUS owes their existance today, because of the open design, not proprietary IBM, of that IBM PC. That is a FACT.

ASUS will soon be looking at Quanta with their commercial OLPC. If they want to be ahead of everyone else, they need to look into history to understand that with this head start, they need to avoid the Apple proprietary mentality problem (note to file, forget about the iPod, Apple has what percentage of the overall PC business). i386 is what percentage, and why is that? Rest my case.

I understood where Groklaw Reader was going.

Asus needs to figure it’s life out and make sure it doesn’t make the same mistakes as other companies throughout history. You can’t control people, if you try, you may not fail, but you won’t do as good as you can. Asus needs to understand this simple fact and realize that its not only in their best interest to open up the hardware a little and make it upgradeable for their customers but that this way of doing things always comes back to benefit them on another level.
Take cars, computers, whatever you want. People will modify them to meet their needs. Sooner or later the car companies see or hear about these modifications and consider them, if they make sense they implement them.

Asus sees tnkgrl’s bluetooth mod and thinks “hey, that’s a pretty cool idea, we should do that” and when you see the next EEE, it might have bluetooth built in.

Ford sees people in front of it in traffic with a third brake light on their car and they think “you know what, that kinda helps braking visibility, we should look into that” and soon enough you see it implemented.

Giving us choice and options can never hurt and we will gladly play a small premium even for that choice. $10 to 15 for the ability (that I should have had in the first place since they came with it!!!) to add mini-pci-express cards would be in fact worth it.

racingclub,
The ASUS model is not broken, but they could break it easily if they don’t watch out.
fadumpt is right. The success of the IBM PC was that it was open. Other companies owe their current existance to this fact, including ASUS (also the open system that IBM created, actually caused more business, not less, Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Sony, Acer, Western Digital, Sandisk, and a long list of both software and hardware companies that at this point in time would fit into a book size folder, ALL OWE THEIR CURRENT DAY SIZE and their origins to the fact that the IBM PC was an OPEN HARDWARE Platform . When IBM tried to do the PS/2 it failed. Why. Because they tried to make it a closed system (to reverse what they started with the IBM PC). The number of successes that Apple has created on the side is really not many. Only a core group of people are excited about the Apple PC line… being closed, it is it’s own story, that is all. Without the iPod Apple might be close to being dead today. Apple doing a i386 system is owing to the IBM open hardware format. So – they will become another benefactor of the open 8088 design that IBM introduced.

You don’t create business by putting water on the flames, you only create business by putting more logs on the fire. It is a fact that fast food restaurants make more money if they are located next to other fast food restaurants. Yep – once the Dopamine starts to flow (dopamine is the natural stuff in the body that actually causes us to buy stuff, and the reason why folks buy time shares that they don’t need while on vactation), once it is triggered, then nearby things get bought too.

This is why LINUX will succeed over Windows. Choice and excitement over product, and the abililtiy to tinker! One of the programs on TV with cars is about folks who soup up their cars, and race em (called Pinks or something like that), or what Orange County Chopper is doing… Can you do custom stuff with Microsoft software (NO, MS will not permit it). So MS software is boring stuff. Hey, The Red Hat model is working because in business, everyone will need support except for the extreme geeks, and when yours goes on vacation or leaves where you work, the boss wants to have someone to call, and so with Red Hat they can call em (for a price).

Hey- ASUS business model is not broken… they just gotta understand that the reason why folks are excited about Eee PC (the first wave) is because they are most likely LINUX geeks in the first place, and you gotta expect they will hack it as soon as they get it. SO – ASUS really wants to make them happy, why not? You don’t tell them to sit in the corner and do nothing with this i386 device that is natually something that should be played around with and improved. Doing nothing is boring. People want to tinker.

That is the business model behind the success of the IBM PC (the folks that tinkered in the garages, like Michael Dell, well that is an example of the kind of business model that will succeed. No one has succeeded, in the same way with Apple stuff (even Apple itself really is not famous for the fact that a lot of people use their PCs! Really, Apple, seems to have a love/hate relationship with their fans, as Apple hates their fans who have sites that predict what Apple is doing and even tries to sue them???? Do they really like or dislike their customers? That is Apples biggest problem (they only wish to feed them, and not to let them feed themselves, but still buying the seeds from Apple).

The birth of the modern Personal Computer did not evolve out of the Labs of some company, it evolved out of some hobbiest passion that started the whole business. Someone, who had a dream and a desire to tinker. ASUS would do better to allow more of this with their Eee PC.

As humans, it is in our genes to tinker. Asus, with the Eee PC, needs to wake up to that fact. And profit by it, in the same way that they sell Motherboards to those that make their own PCs. They owe their existence, in part to those who like to tinker.

Check out http://eeetutorials.blogspot.com/
for some walkthroughs

Simon: it’s not just geek chatter, I have the same want for a simple notebook that I can pull out anywhere and just work. I also want a computer that if I decide a few months down the road that I want to add something to it, I should be able to. You say you are a normal user, what happens when you want to add a cellular modem to the EEE so you can use that cool new cell phone data plan you got just bought for internet everywhere…nope, you are stuck with an ugly USB device out the side of it…not quite “pull it out and use it anymore huh

Red Menace: do a bit of research before posting? sounds like someone else needs to do some research as well….PowerPC was a RISC based processor, x86 is CISC, RISC is obviously the better chip to have but Apple was a big buyer in IBM’s market (think massive sales of servers with the same chip that doesn’t need to be very fast at all)

I’m not entirely sure what you are getting at with those market percentages but then again i haven’t read Groklaw Reader’s post yet either, oh well…

Oh, come on Fadumpt, look, 200 quid, what do yo expect? So you plug a USB G3 stick in, is that such a pain? You want perfection? wait for an Apple version and pay 5, 6, 7 times as much. When you pay 200 quid buddy, you buy compromises.

like to share this to all of you. was so pissed @the launching yesterday here at singapore. crazy asus staff place a huge Windows live logo right next to the eeepc picture and not even a single logo for linux nor xandros. i mean.. come on asus.. give linux enough justice for this machine!!!!