Journal:What is the "source" of open-source hardware?
| Full article title | What is the "source" of open-source hardware? |
|---|---|
| Journal | Journal of Open Hardware |
| Author(s) | Bonvoisin, Jérémy; Mies, Robert; Boujut, Jean-François; Stark, Rainer |
| Author affiliation(s) | Technische Universität Berlin, Grenoble Alpes University |
| Primary contact | Email: jeremy dot bonvoisin at tu-berlin dot de |
| Year published | 2017 |
| Volume and issue | 1(1) |
| Page(s) | 5 |
| DOI | 10.5334/joh.7 |
| ISSN | 2514-1708 |
| Distribution license | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International |
| Website | https://openhardware.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/joh.7/ |
| Download | https://openhardware.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/joh.7/galley/12/download/ (PDF) |
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This article should be considered a work in progress and incomplete. Consider this article incomplete until this notice is removed. |
Abstract
What “open source” means once applied to tangible products has been so far mostly addressed through the light of licensing. While this approach is suitable for software, it appears to be over-simplistic for complex hardware products. Whether such a product can be labelled as open-source is not only a question of licence but a question of documentation, i.e. what is the information that sufficiently describes it? Or in other words, what is the “source” of open-source hardware? To date there is no simple answer to this question, leaving large room for interpretation in the usage of the term. Based on analysis of public documentation of 132 products, this paper provides an overview of how practitioners tend to interpret the concept of open-source hardware. It specifically focuses on the recent evolution of the open-source movement outside the domain of electronics and DIY to that of non-electronic and complex open-source hardware products. The empirical results strongly indicate the existence of two main usages of open-source principles in the context of tangible products: publication of product-related documentation as a means to support community-based product development and to disseminate privately developed innovations. It also underlines the high variety of interpretations and even misuses of the concept of open-source hardware. This reveals in turn that this concept may not even be clear to practitioners and calls for more narrowed down definitions of what has to be shared for a product to be called open source. This article contributes towards this effort through the definition of an open-source hardware lifecycle, summarizing the observed approaches to open-source hardware.
Keywords: open-source hardware, open design, open innovation, open-source innovation, open-source product development
Introduction
We are currently witnessing an increasing number of initiatives transferring product development and production from the private sector to the public. Enabled by the growing accessibility of affordable manufacturing technology, this is manifested in the expansion of the so-called “maker culture,” which takes action to install participational production as an alternative to industrial production.[1][2] The emergence of this culture is interwoven with the phenomenon of open-source hardware (OSH), which transfers open-source principles (as defined by Open Source Initiative 2007) from their origins in software development to the world of physical objects.[3] While these new practices are raising significant attention, they are still in their infancy and struggle to reveal their full economic, social, and environmental potential. One of the challenges they face is that sharing knowledge about atoms is not as frictionless as sharing bits.
References
- ↑ Hatch, M. (2013). The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 9780071821124.
- ↑ Voigt, C.; Montero, C.S.; Menichinelli, M. (2016). "An Empirically Informed Taxonomy for the Maker Movement". In Bagnoli, F., Satsiou, A.; Stavrakakis, I. et al.. Internet Science - INSCI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 9934. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-45982-0_17. ISBN 9783319459820.
- ↑ Balka, K. (2011). Open Source Product Development. Gabler Verlag. p. 4. doi:10.1007/978-3-8349-6949-1. ISBN 9783834969491.
Notes
This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation. In some cases important information was missing from the references, and that information was added. The original article lists references alphabetically, but this version—by design—lists them in order of appearance.
