All over the world, low-tech initiatives arise or develop.
81 countries documented on all continents - 649 initiatives spotted and continuously updated - 12 fields of application: energy, water, nutrition, hygiene, ...
The GaudiLabs are an experiment in developping open source culture technology. The lab is a creative space for working, thinking and living where culture and technology meet.
"DropBot is an open-source Digital Microfluidic (DMF) automation system developed in the Wheeler Lab. It features a modular and extensible design, an intuitive user interface, and is capable of driving up to 320 independent channels."
guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware
Open Hardware 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“.
Open Hardware is derivative: here a fork is the rule, not the exception.
overviews of Open Hardware can be found on Make Magazine’s Blog, MIT Technology Review, Computerworld, O’Reilly Radar.
Lists of existing Open Hardware projects can be found on the GOpen Hardware 2009 website, on the P2P Foundation website (here and here), on Make Magazine’s Blog, Open Innovation Projects and Open Knowledge Foundation.
4 possible levels of Openness in Open Hardware projects,
by SparkFun Electronics (USA)
Open Interface
Open Design
Open Implementation
Arduino
most popular Open Hardware project
open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software
ommercially produced
Most of Arduino official boards are manufactured by SmartProjects in Italy.
Arduino brand name
Gravitech (USA).
starting point
Closed
ecosystem
community
mature and simple
Creative Commons license
produce
redesign
sell boards
you just have to credit the original Arduino group and use the same CC license
without paying a license fee or even ask permission
the name Arduino
is trademarked
cheap and durable enough
two different business model
sharing open hardware to sell expertise, knowledge and custom services and projects around it;
hardware is becoming a commodity
selling the hardware but trying to keep ahead of competition with better products
companies that are selling open source hardware
the open source hardware community to reach $ 1 billion by 2015