Hardware:

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can HOld?

BY AARON WEISS

 

Though the philosophy behind open source software is relatively simple—“promote transparency”—it has proved rather complicated in the marketplace, where it has taken more than 20 years for the resulting products to gain a measure of mainstream acceptance. While traditional businesses have struggled to understand the logic and route to profitability behind open source software, the model itself has already made a deep impact on the Internet.

From Linux OS, which powers an increasing number of PCs, to TiVo, the Firefox Web browser, and Apache (the world’s most widely used Web server), open source is now a proven strategy for producing software. But what about hardware? Can open and collaborative development produce physical products, too? Yes, say the advocates of open source hardware, while admitting a few complications. The entire

landscape of consumer technology could change radically as a result.

From cyberspace to meatspace

A persistent source of confusion that has dogged open source software is the conflation between “open” and “free.” Minimally, open source software is code you can see and, depending on the license, modify for your own purposes. Open source software may not necessarily be free, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Likewise, free software is not necessarily open source. A software developer can choose to release compiled binaries of their code without charge, and without being obligated to share the source. You often see this, for example, with freeware programs for Windows, which do not often include source.

A variety of legal licenses have been