Open Hardware taking off (was: Re: [ox-en] Report from OKCon 2011)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 08:24:46 +0200
Hi Robin and all!
2 weeks (17 days) ago Robin Green wrote:
A side note: there is another parallel here. Before Richard Stallman
evangelised the term "free software" with his specific meaning in mind,
source code was frequently passed around between universities - and even
by AT&T - without proprietary software licenses attached. This was
simply done as a matter of course, without perhaps much thought, as the
economic value of exploiting proprietary software either had not been
conceived of or was not of interest.
Yes, but I understood this is rather an anti-parallel than a parallel.
As one participant told in the universities the young engineers are
urged to *not* share stuff. If so there is a cultural difference here
which may be a relevant topic.
However, I think that for creative activities it's *always* more
useful to share ideas and designs. In other words: you can produce
better stuff if you apply the principles of peer production. This is
why I'm confident that sharing will spread in engineering, too.
Following the Marxian point that the new possibilities of the new mode
of production will break through.
At the moment I see one big difference: for Free Software or other
peer production around information goods the means of production -
minds, computers, Internet - are ubiquitous meanwhile. This is not the
case for Open Hardware - but Open Hardware people are busily working
on this! I'm convinced that if the means of production for Open
Hardware are as ubiquitous as those for information goods we will see
a next step here. May be the analogon to the Linux kernel will be a
really cool low cost fabber? At least that is what seems to move most
people in Open Hardware - at least those I meet on conferences ;-) .
Similarly, I don't know much about the history of open hardware -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware doesn't even have a
section on it! - but I think that freely implementable schematics and
tutorials in magazines like Popular Electronics and others, would count
as early "open hardware", without the name attached. And without the
same awareness of being part of a social movement. (But perhaps I'm
wrong, and perhaps the awareness of the potential of open hardware that
we have now was realised by some hardware hackers very early on!)
There is a history of Open Hardware. For instance check out Graham's
talk from the 1st Oekonux Conference at
http://erste.oekonux-konferenz.de/dokumentation/texte/seaman.html
The Homebrew Computer Club indeed saw the movement aspect of the
topic.
Grüße
Stefan