There's been many missed opportunities to get truly open hardware, an to this day we're still missing out on them. There are initiatives to remedy this, but they're still far from complete and need more motivated drivers to carry them forward.
Using a crappy computer from some no-name company in China is a protest vote and is not pushing things forward.
On the other hand, getting hardware hackers together to create a 100% free hardware platform would. The Raspberry Pi is close, all that's really needed is for some more aggressive lobbying to get the PowerVR driver component open-sourced.
Or consider, given how people are taping out custom Bitcoin ASICs, why is it inconceivable that someone could tape out an open-source CPU?
Using a crappy computer from some no-name company in China is a protest vote and is not pushing things forward.
On the other hand, getting hardware hackers together to create a 100% free hardware platform would. The Raspberry Pi is close, all that's really needed is for some more aggressive lobbying to get the PowerVR driver component open-sourced.
Or consider, given how people are taping out custom Bitcoin ASICs, why is it inconceivable that someone could tape out an open-source CPU?