What is the “Source” of Open Source Hardware?

Open Source Hardware

The open source software movement has had an enormous impact on today’s techonology. We see this more and more in recent years. It has aided academic research, it has changed the way many tech companies do business, and it has changed our society. More recently (though not for the first time), the idea of open source hardware has been getting a lot of attention. The purpose of this paper is to ...

From Open Source Software to Open Source Hardware

The open source software principles progressively give rise to new initiatives for culture (free culture), data (open data) or hardware (open hardware). The open hardware is experiencing a significant growth but the business models and legal aspects are not well known. This paper is dedicated to the economics of open hardware. We define the open hardware concept and determine intellectual prope...

What Is the Price of Open-Source Software?

T notion that all scientific software should be opensource and free has been actively promoted in recent years, mostly from the top down via mandates from funding agencies but occasionally from the bottom up, as exemplified by a recent Viewpoint in this journal. A commonly articulated rationale is that the results of scientific research funded by government grants should be free for society and...

Emerging business models for open source hardware

Open-source Hardware: Opportunities and Challenges

Innovation in hardware is slowing due to rising costs of chip design and diminishing benefits from Moore’s law and Dennard scaling. Software innovation, on the other hand, is flourishing, helped in good measure by a thriving open-source ecosystem. We believe that open source can similarly help hardware innovation, but has not yet due to several reasons. We identify these reasons and how the ind...