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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."
Ninjas vs Warlords. Hollywood has probably already stolen the idea.
Seriously though. GVCS takes an interesting approach of building a society. There needs to be some thought behind defending what is created. Take the situations in Mexico and Somalia for examples. Instead of captive populations or towns just hunkering down in scattered huts and praying the tiger comes for your neighbor instead, what designs for communities could successfully defend against warlords/gangs? Would fort designs from the Brits' and US history be updated and prove practical?
Clearly non violent movements won't and can't work in those environments while the populace is scattered and unorganized. Rocks and martial arts are individual defense ideas, not community defense. (I do have a cynic's humor though, so no whoosh here you bastards...)
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"
No other metals/materials, no glass, no plastics,
They do have a machine for making plastics, and there is nothing wrong with using wood in a sustainable culture, if you do so at a replaceable rate.
And there is no plan for how to construct that construction kit in the first place.
There doesn't need to be. The goal isn't to bootstrap civilization after it has collapsed. It is to find the smallest set of machines needed to recreate themselves, and thus allow civilization at say 1930's level to be maintained in as small of economy as possible.
There's a classic "Build a Complete Metalworking Shop from Scrap" set of books. This set of books really does describe how to build machine tools starting from scrap and hand tools. The author was originally thinking of recovery after a nuclear war, when there would be plenty of scrap around.