We’ve seen some confusion about what it means to be a US computer manufacturer and about open hardware. With the Thelio launch just around the corner, it’s a great time for us to add some clarity.



We’ve been working on the Thelio design for about three years. The philosophy around Thelio’s design was fourfold. The design should reflect our company character and culture, the design must support the maximum performance of the fastest available components, be easy to service and upgrade, and must represent the open source roots of System76. Early on, there was a lot of testing and experimentation. We engineered prototyping techniques to quickly iterate on ideas, optimize performance and thermal characteristics, and develop a strategy to open source as much functionality as possible.

Eventually we were ready to move from acrylic prototypes to metal. Then we tried finding factory space in Colorado. That was much harder than expected and it took a full year.

We moved an eight-person engineering and operations team over in March of this year and the rest of the team a few months later. We began converting the design from prototype to production. At our facility, we take in US-sourced sheet metal, aluminum extrusions, and other raw materials. We use production machinery to cut it, bend it, powder coat, etch, and then assemble the parts together along the way to producing the final product. We use components that we source outside the US, like the motherboard, memory, and drives to assemble orders to the customers’ needs. Technically, Thelio is “Designed and manufactured in the US with domestic and foreign components”.

We’ve seen it argued that this isn’t US manufacturing because every part isn’t made in the US. If we sourced every part externally, this would be called “assembled in the US.” That’s not what we’re doing here. We’re transforming raw materials into a final product. The work that goes into this kind of production is complex and expensive. That’s why the location where the final substantial transformation occurs is considered the place of manufacture and the country of origin. For Thelio, that happens in Denver.

Building a factory was a massive step for us. This is the only way to excel as a company. For starters, it enables us to respond more rapidly to our customer’s needs. Additionally, bringing manufacturing in-house helps us reach the end goal: to build an open computer. Internal design and manufacturing is the strategy that we think is most plausible to reach the completely open computer.

A completely open computer includes every part and component. The computer case, the motherboard, the drives, the memory, the cabling, the buttons, the ports, etc. The strictest definition of an open computer is that every single part of the product has openly licensed design files, schematics, and code. No one is there yet. We all understand that it’s not practical to start at the end. So we’re chipping away at the proprietary bits. There’s a lot of work to do. Those of us working to build open computers are taking different approaches and in doing so we all contribute toward this end. The important thing is that we’re all on the same trajectory. There’s a massive market out there that’s dominated by companies that don’t care about making open source hardware. We must make better products than they do if we are to turn that tide.

So, what makes Thelio open hardware? The Thelio design we’ve worked on for three years is open source. That means anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design. You can send the design files to a metal shop to make your own Thelio. You can adapt the design for your needs. Open source hardware is the physical version of open source software. We believe it’s important to apply the same passion we have about software freedom to the hardware itself. The open hardware community is young and small compared to open source software. We hope adding Thelio and Thelio Io to the ranks of open hardware will encourage others to join the movement and make their designs free as well. We’re very excited to see what people will do with free hardware designs. This is relatively new territory.

To further our open computer ambition, we’re working to remove functionality from the proprietary mainboard. To that end, we designed Thelio Io, a daughter board that manages thermal and chassis control while also providing a storage backplane for the drives in Thelio. It’s open hardware and open source firmware, and a big step in the right direction. We’re by no means done. We’ll continue to open source more functionality. Eventually, all that will be left are proprietary hardware initialization bits and convincing Intel and AMD to open up there. We think there’s reason for optimism. Intel contributes lots of code to Linux and AMD graphics drivers are open source already. Maybe open hardware is next for them. Let’s keep pushing.

This is just the start for us. Next, we move to designing laptops with open hardware designs and controllers. An open source keyboard? We’d love to make one. Motherboards? We’ll experiment there too. Having a factory opens up all kinds of possibilities. It’ll take time and a lot of work, but we sure like where we’re headed.