Hardware Is Now Open (sourced) For Business

ptorrone writes "CNBC has an interesting article about the growing trend of hardware companies going open-source. 'The open-source hardware movement is migrating from the garage to the marketplace. Companies that follow an open-source philosophy make their physical designs and software code available to the public. By doing so, these companies engage a wave of makers, hobbyists and designers who don't just want to buy products, but have a hand in developing them.'"

Comments

Hey look, it's Commodore and company!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously though, Commodore, (Apple?), and lots of others used to provide complete wiring schematics either with their hardware, or as a seperately available book up to what, the mid to late 80s?

If the PC and related technology hadn't taken off, would anybody even be talking about 'open hardware' nowadays, or would that just have continued to be the assumed norm?

Just some food for thought.

Re:Hey look, it's Commodore and company!

[Rob Riggs]

Oh yes in the 1960s all "lab" grade electronics like power supplies, oscilloscopes, whatevers, came with thick manuals with schematics, part lists and theory of operation as well as the basic user manual.

That's still the norm for many Amateur Radio products. What is missing from many products supplied by the big name manufacturers these days is source code for the embedded MCUs.

Many radios and test equipment used to be available in kit form too. But that has gone away since the advent of surface mount technology. Most Amateurs don't have the equipment, patience or eyesight to do SMT at home. Besides, pick and place robots will assemble a circuit board in minutes, reducing labor cost to a few cents per board. So, instead of saving a bunch of money on hand-built hardware as it used to, it actually costs more to offer kits than it does fully assembled boards. The technical support costs for kits is pretty high.

Re:Hey look, it's Commodore and company!

[Bengie]

Imagine releasing a CPU manual that explains all of the transistors and quantum physics math behind their layouts. FPGAs and stuff you can document, but advanced electronics requires some real math and physics backgrounds.

Re:Hey look, it's Commodore and company!

[hairyfeet]

The problem is gonna be the patents, especially for mobile GPUs. Anybody who has looked into that stuff can tell you pretty much any way to make a screen render has a patent or hundred and they are all held by a handful of players who sure as hell don't want you playing in their sandbox. Wireless is just as bad, with pretty much every way to send a signal patented up the wazoo.

So while you might pull this off in countries without the IP bullshit but in the corporate states of America its not likely.

Re:Hey look, it's Commodore and company!

[mirix]

IBM released schematics for PC, as well. There is a difference between releasing schematics, and 'open hardware'!

A circuit could be patented, the firmware (and source) may not be supplied or is otherwise encumbered, board layouts not supplied, etc. OSHW projects usually have all of this... everything you need to make it, unencumbered from any restrictive licensing.

Since the PC schematics were readily available, all the clones had to do was make a functionally identical BIOS (as the firmware was copyrighted) and (physically) layout their own motherboards. The circuit can be a copy of the schematic verbatim, and the bulk of it has to be. Only one place you can stick ram to an 8088. Peripheral addresses can't vary, and implementation can't vary much without killing software compatibility, so they all have the same (or code compatible) timers at the same address, etc. It's why the first serial port is always at 0x3F8... nothing special about the address, except IBM used it, and everyone did the same to maintain compatibility.

Re:Nothing really new here ...

[NewWorldDan]

Yep. Many years ago, I was trying to fix a TV from the 70s. Full schematic glued to the inside of the set.

And to a certain extent, hardware has always been open source anyway. A motivated engineer can remove and identify components one by one and follow the wire traces on the circuit board. It's easier to reverse engineer a circuit board than a piece of software. Still, it's a lot easier if they give you the schematic up front. So I'd like to give a big shout out to SparkFun (www.sparkfun.com) electronics, who have made my life a lot easier.

In the footsteps of Arduino

[giampy]

If these companies are trying to occupy the same marketplace as the Arduino, i think it's too late. Otherwise it's definitely a good move.

In any case IMO what really allowed the Arduino to take off was not much the fact that it was open source, but rather the fact that it had readable documentation, which anyone could actually follow and make things work.

I am still amazed at the extent to which, to this day, the documentation for many Arduino-wannabe boards (e.g TI MSP 430, Chipkit 32, and others) really sucks.

Re:In the footsteps of Arduino

[melikamp]

Indeed, "open-source hardware" just sounds stupid, if only because hardware doesn't have what programmers call "source". What we need is free hardware: the one with 4 freedoms RMS keeps talking about. Free hardware implies free and readable specs and documentation, since that's the only way to assure that users can use it and study it. It also implies a free and readable description of the manufacturing process, so that anyone skilled in the trade can make exact or modified copies.

This is about products, not components

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

What's new here is the trend. Companies saw the RepRap project spawn a bunch of companies with a lot of compatibility from the start. Non-RepRap companies are seeing this as a threat to the investment they made using traditional methods (closed design, proprietary supplies and software).

Business people understand the IBM PC clone model. You had a market leader that everyone copied. The old-school thinking was they failed to protect their intellectual property, and lost market share to competitors who copied their design. In other words, they believe IBM could have kept nearly all the marked had they done a better job of keeping it closed, and bought Microsoft while they could.

RepRap and projects like it have upended that thinking. Arduino is seen as a component, not a product, by these people. But 3D printing is getting a lot of press, and business people are starting to take notice. When you create a 10 year plan, and can achieve a huge reduction in R&D spending, along with a reduction of risk, they take notice.

One of the concerns is the believe the a mature market only has room for two main competitors. That means you have a lot of losers. An open source machine makes it much more likely that your company will end up as one of the two majors, and that is a huge reduction of risk. This is becoming a hot topic among many executives. Many are somewhat scared and unsure what to do - if anything.

Business People: a hard time focussing on mone

[scamper_22]

It's a common stereotype that the problem with business people is that all they care about is money.

If only that was the case.

The reality is we all tend to have some model of how things should be paid for and what makes our company different from another.

But, we always need to step back and look at it objectively.

Open Source is not some enemy of revenue on its own.
The old telecom companies (Bells, ATTs...) used to have all kinds of open source products. They knew their revenue was from having a monopoly position over communication.

This is very similar to Google today. They saw that they could be very friendly to open source as their revenue model was service/ad based. I'm sure there are bean counters at Google, but they're not simplistic bean counters who simply say people are using X amount of Google service, so they need to pay Y dollars.

I don't quite know the model for hardware companies. But perhaps just name recognition is enough. Sure with open hardware, anyone could make a copy, but most people, me included, would still pay for the name, to ensure it is done 'right'. I know I could buy a $20 router, but I end up with the Cisco/LinkSys/DLink...
Perhaps enough of a market develops that large companies start paying to support projects while reaping the manufacturing benefits.

I always see the negatives.......

[danknight48]

Open Source Company/Business:
- Get others to do your work for you, claim glory.
- Promote the product for free, by getting others to do it for you.
- Create a license that controls the sale of all products that use the original source.
- No responsibility or legal worries for the company, blame the other guy.

All i see is the company benefiting, mostly?

I'am all for open source. But when a business comes into it, is it "really" open source?