Qi Hardware is now shipping its first "copyleft hardware" device, the ultra-portable Ben NanoNote. The palm-sized notebook is designed to be a hackable hardware platform for Linux developers, akin to what the Arduino board is for electronics projects.

As an emerging sci-fi novelist (see my books here), I've actually been taking a vested interest in Ebooks of late. Of course, I've also been taking interest in them from the perspective that they've become yet another battleground in the widening war of media freedom, an important theater in the much larger war of user freedom.

I know. It sounds crazy. But hear me out. They are antithetical not because of the philosophy, but simply because the nature of the products that they make. Linux makes “backend” stuff, while Apple makes “user-facing”/”frontend” stuff. So, they do not compete. And their philosophy is similar.

So far, I’ve identified examples of free, commons-based production of just about every category of pure information product which exists. And that leads to the next question: what about the material marketplace? Can community methods be used to design, prototype, and manufacture physical products?

At the Gran Canaria Open Desktop Summit in July 2009, the Open-PC project was announced. The statement said the project aimed to "cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community". Further this PC would use only hardware for which there are free software drivers available. This would be a PC with the minimal compromise required for running a free desktop.

Several device-oriented products familiar to LinuxDevices readers came away from last week's LinuxWorld Expo with product excellence awards. Winners included Trolltech's Qtopia Greenphone SDK (software development kit), Unicon's System-on-Display hardware reference design, and Coverity's online software quality testing tools.

Unicon Systems, the developer of a Linux based platform of choice for mobile applications, has been awarded The LinuxWorld 2007 “Best of Show” Product Excellence Award.

There is an old saying in the Linux community (actually in just about every community – but I heard it from a Linux developer first) “eating your own dog food” (or the shorter “hipster friendly” version dogfooding. This basically means using the product you create.

Chumby, a Linux-based device that streams widgets, is cute -- there's little doubt about that. In order to gain traction in the consumer market, however, it's going to take a lot more than the cute factor, analysts say. The device's maker is banking on its widget network to underpin its business model.