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CERN Launches Open Hardware Initiative
sfcrazy writes "CERN has launched version 1.1 of the Open Hardware License (OHL), a legal framework to facilitate knowledge exchange across the electronic design community. The alpha version was launched four months ago. In the spirit of knowledge and technology dissemination, the CERN OHL was created to govern the use, copying, modification and distribution of hardware design documentation, and the manufacture and distribution of products."
CERN and others have already designed Open Hardware in the OHR. See for example the SPEC board http://www.ohwr.org/projects/spec/wiki the 100 Ms/s ADC mezzanine http://www.ohwr.org/projects/fmc-adc-100m14b4cha/wiki and the Rhino http://www.ohwr.org/projects/rhino-hardware-01/wiki. All of these, and others, you can buy from a number of vendors, and more are in the pipeline. Have a look at the OHR projects page: http://www.ohwr.org/projects
I am not an expert, but I think the big difference with Physics is that there is a lot of money involved (patents for new drugs, etc). In Physics, CERN and others had the vision of Open Access http://library.web.cern.ch/library/OpenAccess/ for scientific publications, a mode in which the editing expenses are paid by the authors so that readers can access freely. This was possible because the big publishers were not really given an option: if they said no, physicists would publish on already-existing free places like arxiv.org which give comparable (if not better) visibility. Since there are rarely any immediate money-making applications for Physics papers, an atmosphere of openness could develop and once Physicists got used to it there is no way back.