System76 Open Sources the Electronics for Virgo, Its Upcoming In-House Linux Laptop Design

System76, builder of Linux-based desktops, laptops, and servers, has announced that its upcoming Virgo laptop will be designed in the open — and to prove it, has published its circuits' design files to GitHub under a reciprocal license.

"We will be moving Virgo laptop PCB design to this public, GPLv3 licensed [GitHub repository]," Jeremy Soller, System76 principal engineer, announced via Twitter yesterday, shortly before the files went live. "This will be the most open, modern x86 motherboard design I know of."

The Virgo laptop project was first teased by the company back in April, when System76 founder and chief executive Carl Richell shared images of a case part milled from aluminum bar stock. "There wouldn't be an ODM or OEM [Original Design Manufacturer or Original Equipment Manufacturer] involved in this case," he explained at the time, "but some outside suppliers would make parts for us that we design. We don't have SMT [Surface Mount Technology] machines for PCBs for instance but we do the EE [Electronic Engineering] work. We have laser, mills, brakes, 3D printing, paint, fastener machines and other machines and techniques in the Denver factory."

It's a big departure for System76, which has previously — in common with most laptop brands — used ODM chassis for their devices. But the promise of the Virgo project extends beyond the exterior and into the hardware itself: it will ship with electronics designed in-house, including its motherboard.

The KiCad design files for these electronics have already been uploaded to GitHub, where they're made available under the reciprocal copyleft GNU General Public License 3.0 — giving others the opportunity to contribute tweaks, which System76 would be under no obligation to merge back into the project, or to fork the effort and make their own. It's an approach the company has tried before, albeit on a smaller scale: back in May 2021 it launched an in-house mechanical keyboard for which the electronic design files were made available under the same GPL 3.0 license.

"Open hardware is a superset of right to repair," Soller claims of the company's goals for the project. "You won't just have the right to repair Virgo, you'll have all the information needed to do it, even all the information needed to manufacture your own!"

For now, though, the company has not announced availability or pricing for the Virgo laptop — while the fact that modifications are still being made to the project files in the GitHub repository and the motherboard's PCB design is presently unrouted suggests the work has yet to be finalized.