Disclosure: I work for AWS but have no involvement direct or indirect with any teams that may be open hardware vs open source hardware reset on topics related to this post if any. One of the key focus areas of the OHF is the production of open hardware. No way of reverse-engineering it since the source code is not made available. Likewise, you still have to pay someone to make the hardware for you, but this openly-licensed hardware still comes without the costs of royalties. The debate between 'open' and 'free' libre that exists Open Hardware And Source Region in the software space exists for hardware as well.

This may not matter. Is open source hardware a thing? No, I'm not asking whether open source hardware projects exist. No, what I mean is, have any open source hardware projects taken off similar to Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, or Linux? And, perhaps just as interestingly, does an open source hardware project have to reach that level of prominence in order for it to be useful?

As Huggins related, "I always wanted to play with robots professionally but had no idea how to get there. Tinkering, he built a button-pushing robot, one capable of replicating the human motion of pushing a touchscreen and thereby playing Angry Birds back when that was a thing.

In so doing, he caught the attention of Mercedes-Benz, which ordered 10 and put Huggins on his current path. Huggins open sourced Tapster's hardware and software , encouraging contributions like this one from Pierre-Yves Lapersonne. There haven't been millions of contributions, however, or even hundreds.

Does the fact that it's open source really matter? On the one hand, the answer is clearly "Yes. This instills trust. As Huggins said of the early, unexpected success of his screen-tapping robot:.

The robot wasn't like "I had 50, downloads and it was time to quit my job" but I started to realize that it wasn't a joke; not an art project. There were real people in quality control who make tangible, physical products, and they were having difficulty at the intersection between software and hardware. By open sourcing Tapster, Huggins not only gave such people a product they could use to navigate this "intersection between software and hardware," but also the means to evaluate it at low cost, while minimizing their need to trust Huggins as its developer --they could inspect the hardware designs and associated code and see for themselves.

Is there a huge population of developers interested in screen-tapping robots? Need there be? I'm not sure. Early in open source's evolution, someone told me that open source could only succeed with a sufficiently large population of developers with interest and aptitude in a particular area. This, he explained, was one reason open source flourished in the operating system space every developer needs an OS and less so in ERP no one writes ERP software unless they're paid to do so.

And yet, for Tapster, it could be enough to rally the few automobile manufacturers to collaborate on hardware designs specific to their needs. One wouldn't need millions of developers to make that collaboration worthwhile to the few. Unlike open source software, open source hardware seems like it will always be at a bit of a disadvantage. Software, after all, can be free, requiring only an investment of one's time, but hardware will always have a cost.

It takes up space. We users want to be free to use the objects we own for any purpose and in combination with any other objects or software we choose or create. We should not be limited to using it only in ways that the manufacturer or some other, external, entity deems appropriate.

You can use it as you see fit: The quote from Lourens is actually a paraphrase of freedom 0 from the Free Software Foundation : the freedom to use software however you see fit, made in the context of hardware. This is effectively the philosophical underpinning for "Why Open Hardware"?

The remainder of the Free Software Foundation's freedoms apply, to some degree, to the hardware realm as well. You can figure out how it really works: This corresponds to the FSF freedom 1: the freedom to study how the something works and to adapt it to your own needs. Far from being a simple matter of curiosity, being able to understand how a device works can enable you to make much better use of it. For instance, if there are two ways of performing the same operation in a device, being able to understand the internal operation allows you to determine the more efficient of the two ways for a given situation.

You can make it better for everyone: This echoes the FSF freedom 3: the freedom to improve the hardware and to release your improvements so that others may benefit as well. This is the most altruistic of the philosophical reasons for open hardware. Much of the innovation throughout history has been due to individuals building on preexisting ideas and sharing the results.

Building on preexisting hardware is no different. You will notice I skipped over freedom 2: the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. It doesn't map quite so well into the hardware world; not for philosophical reasons so much as for practical ones. In the hardware world, especially that of Open Source Ultrasound Hardware Failed semiconductors, the financial barrier to making copies of hardware is such that redistributing physical copies is not generally viable for an individual.

In order to enable freedom 2, you have to embrace a number of more practical, and commercially interesting reasons for using open hardware. These are the reasons a business might be interested in producing a device based on open hardware.

Open hardware can sell more units: By making a device open, you gain access to market segments that would not be available otherwise. Further, in some cases, it is possible to modify the operating system running on these devices to allow them to provide other functionality potentially unrelated to their original purpose. In these cases, the ability to modify the functionality of the device has been discovered by reverse engineering.

Still, you now have people buying units, sometimes several, to use for other reasons. A unit with a lower barrier to modification, due to available open documentation, will generate an even higher level of interest within certain groups leading to sales that otherwise would not have occurred. Open hardware has the potential to speed development of new devices: Most complex hardware devices are made up of many smaller building blocks many of which are not specific to that device, just like most programs use general purpose libraries for many functions.

Large hardware companies build up libraries of hardware building blocks over time, but in many cases multiple companies end up re-implementing the same basic hardware blocks. Why should I re-design a hardware multiplier when I need one for a micro controller ALU arithmetic logic unit? It should be noted that this effect of open hardware, reducing design and implementation time by providing readily-available libraries, tends to benefit small companies more than large ones.

This can have the effect of reducing the barrier to entry into a market segment and allowing more resources to be focused on the innovative part of the product which in turn helps increase competition. The community will help you support your product. When talking about personal computer hardware, you run into the problem of drivers. Anyone who has tried to use cutting edge hardware in Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, Plan 9, or other more esoteric operating systems is keenly aware that much new hardware is supported poorly, or not at all.

And in truth, it may not be financially justifiable. However, if I as an end user cannot use brand X hardware on my nice shiny new Linux box because I can't get drivers, I am going to go by brand Y hardware for which I can get good, working drivers even if the brand Y hardware provides less functionality. The company making brand X cards just lost a sale, all because there weren't drivers available.

This is not due to a lack of people willing to write drivers for such hardware. It is due to a lack of the necessary documentation on how to make the hardware work. The Open Graphics Project or OGP is an effort to design, implement, and manufacture a free and open 3D graphics chip set and reference graphics card. The OGP was started because existing consumer-level graphics adapters will only work to their full extent with certain specific operating systems, using proprietary drivers.

This puts owners of such a card at the mercy of its manufacturer for as long as they are using it, especially on less mainstream, thus less supported, platforms that are left prone to security and maintenance problems.

Unlike software, hardware is a physical item and costs money to produce, lots of money. Traversal is a for-profit corporation aimed at commercializing and licensing the Open Graphics core. One of Timothy's concerns in forming Traversal was the company's Open Source Quadcopter Hardware Model interaction with the open source community.

With Traversal, or any commercial entity interested in making open hardware, such an organization could serve as a guide or reality check, helping the hardware vendor understand the needs and ideals of the people who would buy their hardware. For these reasons and others, the Open Hardware Foundation was created.

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