Why
Why am I keeping this blog? Briefly: to help spread software freedom into the hardware world.
I began using free open source software not long ago. More and more I am understanding the importance of software freedom and the efficiency and quality of the open source approach. In my journey into the free software world, the public information that can be found online helped me a lot. Good information is a fundamental resource for any technical environment. If every bit of knowledge was closed, every project needs to start from scratch; when knowledge is spread, anyone has the freedom to choose a starting point and make a progress from there. We have now the possibility to run software on our computer and know exactly what is being run, who are the developers that wrote it and why it is doing what is doing.
There are many layers of software, from device drivers to web sites; I prefer to work on the interface between hardware and software. I feel like I am standing on the ground and I don’t know what is below me, but I am confident that it won’t collapse under my feet. In the same way I don’t know exactly the implementation of the processor that is running on my computer, but I know what it does, and I am confident that it won’t fail. When hardware fails, it feels like a sinkhole: “What’s happening?!? The earth is not supposed to do that!” but indeed it happens. It’s unexpected and it’s a catastrophe. Because of this, I feel compelled to dig and examine what’s below. I like open source hardware because it offers me a software development platform that can be studied and even modified. It’s a matter of knowledge and trust.
Freedom Embedded blog is my personal technical diary where I organize my knowledge and give it to everyone. I want the information I put here to contribute to the global knowledge on the subjects of hardware, embedded platforms and free software.
I work at ST Microelectronics, but all opinions expressed in this blog are my own and may not reflect ST policies or priorities.
Blog Structure
The blog posts fall into three main categories, that can be browsed from the right sidebar:
- Software: posts regarding using and developing programs. It has more subcategories:
- Embedded: useful information to develop on embedded platforms.
- Internet: social networking, web services, and network in general.
- Security: posts concerning privacy, protection, and how to improve them using software tools.
- Hardware: a look into the digital word, systems on chip, ASICs, Electronic Design Automation and micro-controllers.
- Working: tips to improve productivity and the working life in general.
Each post is tagged, and each tag can be used to search wordpress.com for blog post with the same tag.
- The home page of the blog contains the excerpts of the most recent posts.
- The About Me page is a brief description of the blog author.
- The Archives page contains a compact list of posts to navigate.
The right sidebar contains some tools to navigate my site, such as the category list, the RSS feeds that readers can subscribe to, and my “most wanted” posts.
Comments
The comments are spam-filtered by WordPress, then they are personally moderated by me. I will approve, in general, comments that are pertinent with the topic of the blog post, requests of support, and warnings pointing out errors or ambiguity. I will block spam, non-informative messages of congratulations and compliments, and rants that are not backed up by logic. Remember that I am responsible of publishing your comments, and if I let illegal/controversial content slip on the pages of my blog then WordPress has the authority to close it.
License
Freedom Embedded by Francesco Balducci is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.
If you want to use the content of this blog you have to comply with this licence. In the common case when you want to re-blog a post, a simple solution is to add at the beginning (or at the end) of your re-blog the following line, substituting the “Freedom Embedded” link with the link to page you re-blogged:
Source: Freedom Embedded by Francesco Balducci, license CC BY-SA 4.0.
The code when not specified is also under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license; if you adapt it and you want to share it, this license allows you to share it also under other compatible licenses such as GPLv3.
More detailed information about this license can be found on the Creative Commons website.
Posts
Freedom Embedded 