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Why Open Source Hardware Will Better the World Faster

Talking about open source, everyone's first impression will be the GNU General Public License (GPL). While the software world has been revolutionised by GPL, the hardware world has had little change. Every hardware maker are still busy filing patents trying to make more money. That must be good for their shareholders, but the advancement of the human race has suffered because of it. Therefore patent, while it was first designed to improve the world by sharing the knowledge, have became the obstacle of the advancement.

In the hardware world, open source usually means Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license[1]. It lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. It must be hard for hardware makers to believe that a CC BY-SA license actually wouldn't hurt their bottom line because while everyone else can make better versions of their products, they can too make better versions of others' products. It's a win-win situation where each iteration improves a little and over time, the world will be a better place much faster than it would be otherwise.

One of the most famous open source hardware is Arduino and its popularity is largely the result of its openness. Although it is open source from the PCB up, its hardware components, mainly processors are still proprietary. Imagine if those are also open source. We need more project like Arduino to promote openness because only if enough open products are being made, being discussed, being famous, then we would have the chance to persuade hardware makers to follow suit.

Where would you find open source hardware? Chances are because the benefits of open source hardware are not obvious, there are no investors, no big bucks, no PR, no media coverage. Even if you search for it, you'd mostly find proprietary hardware running open source software. However, they exist! The natural habitat for open source hardware is crowdfunding because almost no investors will invest in them before the general mindset is changed. Crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo where hardware is not crucified[2], is one of the best source to look for true open source hardware. Now I challenge you to search for "open source hardware" on Indiegogo and others to support open source hardware like you support open source software.

[1] This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

[2] Kickstarter, for example, declines almost all hardware because "Kickstarter is not a store." emphasised by them. Unfortunately that includes open source hardware too.
http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store

KONY 2012

Computer Virus Affects Hospitals

I was amongst the people who visited Royal London Hospital today and saw the action first hand. BBC News Article

The Register has a more in-depth article.

FOSDEM 2009

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