Realising the Dream of Open Source Hardware

Posted by Penguin on Jul 15, 2010 5:16 PM EDT
Computerworld UK; By Glyn Moody 		Mail this story
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The growing success of open source software has naturally spurred on others to apply its lessons elsewhere. Open content is perhaps the most famous translation, notably through the widely-used Creative Commons licences. But one of the most challenging domains to come up with something equivalent to the Open Source Definition (OSD) is hardware – not surprisingly, perhaps, since hardware is analogue, not digital, and hence very different in nature.

Nonetheless, the desire to do so has overcome the obstacles and come up with Open Source Hardware Definition Draft 0.3, which helps to define compliant open source hardware licences:

Open Source Hardware (OSHW) is a term for tangible artifacts -- machines, devices, or other physical things -- whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things. This definition is intended to help provide guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware.

Interestingly, it is explicitly based on the OSD:

OSHW Draft Definition 0.3 is based on the Open Source Definition for Open Source Software and draft OSHW definition 0.2, further incorporating ideas from the TAPR Open Hardware License.

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