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The Unspoken Rules of Open Source Hardware
ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine's article talks about some of the {unspoken} rules most/all the open-source hardware community seems to follow. Why? Because the core group of people who've been doing what is collectively called 'open source hardware' know each other — they're friends, they overlap and compete in some ways, but they all work towards a common goal: sharing their works to make the world a better place and to stand on each others shoulders and not each others toes : ) There will be some folks who agree strongly with what they've outlined as 'unspoken rules,' others, will completely disagree with many points too. That's great, it's time we start this conversation!"
Guess there is some truth to it, it's like us old farts that started messing with our computers back in the ZX80 Commodore vic 20 / 64 days...when we tweaked and tuned and got rid of borders & made the impossible - possible.
I still do that these days, my workshop is a gazillion components (nos from eBay etc...) from factories worldwide gone bust, old electronics...albeit new and unused - finds new life in makers everywhere.
The maker generation - is our new generation, it's like the electronics hobby is rising from the dust again. Love it, embrace it - and above all - have a LOT of fun with it.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Never talk about Open Source Hardware.
Rant on. I read that hoping for some interesting discussion of how open source hardware filters down to users. Enabling people to build better, and innovate quicker, and all I got was some weird manifesto about how no one is doing it right except the few people this guy knows.
hiya - you can check out the dozens of other articles, talks and overviews for what you're looking for - just google around or you can also email me and i can point you to a few. this article was specifically about the rules we all seem to follow, not "how open source hardware filters down to users". if you're interested in a specific one about that, here's one i wrote about someone who took a design we worked on and funded a kickstarter, by doing open source we enabled people to build better, and innovate quicker:
Open Source Hardware is Kick-Starting Kickstarter!
http://blog.makezine.com/2011/10/20/how-open-source-hardware-is-kick-starting-kickstarter/
ptorrone am I accurately summarizing the article as "Don't be a jerk"?
I would advise that people who don't get it wrt social interaction in open hardware ecosystem are probably going to continue to "not get" that social interaction thing therefore respond unfavorably to having it pointed out to them. Its funny to read for those who already get it, but I donno how to get people who don't get it, to get it.
I've got another good unrelated question, what is the prevailing theory on why the Venn diagram of ham radio experimenters and "makers" is approximately zero people despite having pretty much the same tools, ethic, motivations, attitudes, etc? I've never seen a good explanation of that. Maybe I should write an article for Make magazine about that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Great, now they'll have to start a new set of unwritten rules.
Leave arrogance at the door!
This rule is also best applied towards everything in life.
LOL read the article. Cultural rules vs legal rules. You'll be mightly lonely, and probably poor, if you insist on only following the legal rules.
That applies to other areas of life too. Cultural rule says you live in the USA, you buy your kids gifts for dec 25 and do all that Santa and pine tree and rudolf the reindeer stuff and christmas lights hanging from raingutters. Christians also do extra things like attend church, but whatever that's been marginalized pretty far. Yes, there is no law that says you must display a decorated pine tree in your house in December. Does not mean that a sociological study article explaining the Santa Claus story is irrelevant solely because its not part of the US constitution. Does mean life gets hard if you chose to live life in a way that rubs your neighbors wrong.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What's with the curly brackets around {unspoken}? Is it punctuation free-for-all day" where we can just use any punctuation mark as we see fit] I!m not sure if I like the idea or not( but I could get used to it/
Festivus for the rest of us!
The hardware itself, if not patented, is simply in the Public Domain.
"The hardware itself" is almost certainly a FPGA. Verilog, VHDL, etc. are copyrightable works just like any other code.
If it's an IC of some flavor then in the USA you can protect the mask for 10 years.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Paying royalties and not cloning doesn't seem very open source to me. Open source licenses explicitly allow not paying royalties and cloning. If you don't allow that, someone will say it's not open source. So why bother calling it open source if we'll just get in trouble for not paying royalties or creating something that's too much of a clone?
I just read TFA, and that puppy grinder sounds great. Anyone got schematics for it?
I think Microsoft still has patents on puppy grinding.
More Twoson than Cupertino
To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard.
Why open-source software works is:
Widely available repository of code.
Many people able to review it, or sections of it, and understand it.
Ease of submitting tested patches.
Hardware has problems that don't really fit well with this.
The open schematic is the trivially easy part, and not really a problem.
(though in practice, you need a schematic with copious links to design documents, which isn't well solved by open tools).
The number of people who can review it is rather smaller - as you can't
open up a c file, and see a clear error or awkwardness in code that can be edited.
For all but the most basic errors, you are going to have to sit down and
read several hundred pages of hardware documentation about how the chips in question work, in addition to having in-depth knowledge about the circuit design, and costings of likely changes.
Now, you've done this, and generated a patch that you think (for example) lowers the supply current by 1%.
Compile - test.
On a PC, this takes a couple of minutes.
For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain.
Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
So, you're at the thick end of a thousand dollars for a 'compile'.
Now, you boot the device, and it exhibits random hangs.
Neglecting the fact that you are going to need several hundred to several thousand dollars of test equipment, you now have to find
the bug.
Is it:
A) The fact that unlabled 0.5*1mm component C38 is in fact 20% over the designed value, as the assembly company put the wrong one in.
B) C38 has a tiny bridge of solder underneath it that is making intermittent contact.
C) The chipmaker for the main chip hasn't noticed that their chip doesn't quite do what they say it will do, and the datasheet is wrong.
D) You missed a tangential reference on page 384 of the datasheet to proper setup of the RAM chip, and it is pure coincidence that all models up till now have booted.
E) Because you're ordering small quantities, you had to resort to getting the chips from a distributor who diddn't watch their supply chain really carefully, and your main chip has in fact been desoldered from a broken cellphone.
F) Though the design of the circuit is correct, and the board you made matches that design, and all the parts are correct and work properly, the inherent undesired elements introduced by real life physics means it doesn't work.
G) A completely random failure of a part that could occur with even the best design, and best manufacture.
G - may mean that it's worthwhile making two or more of each revision - which of course boosts costs.
Hardware is nasty.
This gets a lot less painful of course for lower end hardware. For very limited circuits, which can be done on simple inexpensive PCBs, and be easily soldered at home - costs of a 'compile' can be in the tens of dollars, or even lower.
I think what's being proposed is actually a weak form of patent protection.
"So I see you're selling something called 'noTV'. Is that a clone of TV-B-Gone?"
"Yes."
"Did you improve upon it somehow?" (see "Cloning ain't cool")
"Yes."
"Great, then you're doing something useful! How did you improve it?"
"Okay, so that was a lie. It's a direct clone."
"That's not good. You shouldn't do that. At the very least you should pay royalties you work out with the TV-B-Gone team." (see "We pay each other royalties...", "we credit each other, a lot")
"No, thanks."
"Well! Expect a stern look the next time we see you!" (As I said, weak protection.)
If you like the idea of patents, but ultimately want them to be toothless and enforced only by social mechanisms, then these ideas are for you. Which is about the right level of enforcement, given that most of these things can't be protected under patent (not novel) or copyright.
Open source software actually has stronger protection mechanism under copyright (and in some instances such as a Linux kernel, software patents) to make up for the lower barrier of entry for imitators (copiers). At the very least there are licenses that let you stipulate what applications you don't want your software being used for, how you can brand it, whether improvements MUST be fed back into the original project, and what kinds of other software it can interface with, if the author is so inclined to place those restrictions on a work. And ultimately, those agreements have legal teeth.
For hardware of this sort, the barrier to entry is only cost to build and market such hardware, and the protection is very weak. There are some trade secret laws that electronics manufacturers can usually invoke for direct rip-offs before a product hits market, but after it reaches the market tear-downs are legal, and products are easy enough to copy. Most designs boil down to "reading the IC manufacturer's intended application circuit from the datasheet," and that's about it. Very difficult to protect. That's why most cases today (such as Apple vs... well, everyone) involve using software patents to disrupt a competitor.
I expect that the open-source hardware movement will have an increasingly difficult time enforcing these unspoken rules as it gains traction. And none of this touches on problems arising from applying the open source model to hardware, such as whether or not updating an old designs based on EOL'd parts to use newer parts is a new design, a major improvement, or a trivial change.
ghostworks, you're right! open source software actually has stronger protection mechanism under copyright. copyright does not apply to electronic / physical designs.
tv-b-gone (the name) is trademarked. so while someone could make a direct clone, if they were selling it using the name there is some protection against that. that's really all we have in hardware. our trademarks and our copyrights for things like our code, documentation, etc.
all hardware has weak protection, as in pretty much none. maybe a patent in some cases of course. there isn't a license that will protect you if you want to release your hardware as "open source" or keep it closed - so we need to come up with other things if we want to share our hardware.
so far the social norms have worked out, we're not trying to clone each other out of business because we see the value in some of these unspoken rules. maybe it's going to end soon, we'll see - i wanted to write about what's going on now.
Looking back, I think that my post above would have better served as two separate posts. Had I not been in such a hurry, I probably would have written one post commenting on the similarity between the unwritten rules and basic patent protection, then another later on the difference between software and hardware open source.
Again, my goal is not to belittle the movement or the practices the community is using now. I'm just concerned that the fact that there are fewer protection mechanisms for hardware projects will make licenses more difficult to enforce, and ultimately will make open source hardware projects more difficult to manage and keep in line than their software counterparts.
Fortunately, there are still software protections available for applications requiring controller firmware. That's usually the difficult part of a project to even experienced designers, and the firmware covers a lot of the real knowledge that goes into a working device (proper timing, error checking, signal processing). If an application is trying to avoid costly embedded operating systems, then the tasks become more difficult and there is even more reason to embrace an open source solution rather than try to start from scratch.
If the open source hardware movement wants to become sustainable as more than a hobbyist endeavor -- and bear in mind, that's not strictly necessary, as there are a lot of electronics hobbyist out there -- they should focus on what's useful to developers as much as end users. Open source software is successful mainly because developers leverage the free operating systems, development tools, and packages to minimize R&D time on other products like servers, monitors, and mobile devices. The end user doesn't care about the fact that 90% of their toy is based on FOSS, but the companies that built the toy benefit from it, and so too does the FOSS community.
Coordinate with FOSS developers to get better tools, and for the love of God standardize on and optimize a good suite the way so many standardized on GNU in the early days. (Sadly, most people I know use Eagle, which is a good schematic capture and layout suite, but is only the best free-as-in-beer option. The free-as-in-speech options I've looked at are ages behind.) Embrace and develop a good, stable RTOS that doesn't require a $10,000 per end product fee, and work to ultimately get it certified for safety-critical systems. Grow the tools, the tools will grow business, and businesses will grow the community.