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Strange Places To Find Open Source
itwbennett writes "Open source is about more than code: It's also about tractors, prosthetics, Christmas lights, and the poor old U.S. Postal Service. If you don't believe that open source changes everything, take a gander at Marcin Jakubowski's Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), a set of 50 industrial machines that are required to build and maintain a small, sustainable civilization. The open source aspect covers designs, instructions, schematics, budgets — everything anyone needs to know to build their own machines, and it is all freely available and free to share."
I like how the GVCS has all these computer controlled tools.... and nowhere in the list is a computer.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You can watch Marcin's TED speech to get an idea of his motivations and experience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsHKrP-66s
But the short answer is, yes, he is building and testing some of them at least. And the point is that it doesn't need to be "industrial scale".
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"