Open Hardware Summit

In academia, we have some nice benefits when it comes to intellectual property. Just about everything we do qualifies as scholarship, and so we take ample advantage of that portion of fair use when dealing with copyrighted works. And we can pretty much ignore patents when building rigs for our experiments, since we aren’t creating commercial products. Of course, we aren’t completely immune. Strictly protected intellectual property results in expensive, closed systems (spectrophotometers, PCR machines, scopes, etc.) that end up limiting what we can do with our experiments.

There’s already a lot of homebrew, custom hardware in science. But there are also a lot of duplicated efforts. The hobbyist community is already putting together ad hoc mechanisms to support and guide collaborative engineering efforts (e.g., Arduino and Adafruit). Labrigger wants to foster the same ideas among the scientific community (e.g., OpenEEG and OpenPCR).

The Open Hardware Summit is opening a dialog on this issue, and seeks to nail down some of the ideas floating around. Their immediate goal is to create a GPL-like license for hardware. They want to encourage derivative works, while still offering some sort of optional protection.

Here’s the current working definition: “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.”