Speculations on the Future of Free Geek

Resources

Free Geek runs on several resources. Without each of these elements Free Geek struggle or even collapse.

• Volunteers
  • who want computers
  • who want to help
    • Environmental activists
    • Digital divide activists
  • who want to learn
    • Hardware tinkerers
    • Software tinkerers
• Other people
  • who buy stuff from us retail (customers)
  • who buy stuff from us for repair (scroungers)
  • who buy scrap from us for recycling (recycling industry)
• Gizmos
  • that can be used and there's a market for above (marketable stuff)
  • that can be used but nobody wants (unmarketable stuff)
  • that are broken (useless stuff)

Driving Forces

Moore's Law

(Exponential growth of computer capabilities)

Moore's law drives the obsolesence of the computers, and thus the cycle of people throwing stuff out. All the gizmos we get are here in a large part because of Moore's Law. Someday this will give out and hardware will plateau. At that point the number of gizmos we receive will drop. No one knows when this will happen.

Software plays catch up to hardware

The development of hardware leads the way, and programmers follow up by:

• first trying to take advantage of the new hardware capabilities, and
• ultimately trying to squeeze the most out of those capabilities.

Because Moore's Law moves so fast the first item predominates. But at Free Geek, we experiment (a bit) more with the second.

We get obsolete stuff

• Five year old equipment is what we started giving away.
• Three year old equipment is what we are giving away now.

Hardware is getting more complex and integrated

• DVD players (for example) are very cheap to make (buy), but very expensive to fix.
• In its early days, the autmobile industry went through a period where a significant number of people tinkered with their own cars. Increasing complexity of the cars has killed this culture (mostly).
• The cycle for computers:
  1. Desktop computers give way to laptops
  2. Laptops give way to PDAs
• Laptops are more integrated and complicated than desktops
• PDAs are too integrated to repair if they fail

rfs 09:50, 24 Jan 2005 (PST)