July 31, 2008
Terminology: Citizen Engineers
A few months back we interviewed Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, about his views on the trend of open source hardware (read it!). In the interview Anderson told us to watch what the guys at Make were doing around this subject, so it was interesting to note that Make have just released a pdf on the subject that they first presented at the Ingite NYC conference recently. In the document they have a lengthy list of the layers that make up open source hardware. The list includes Hardware / Mechanical Diagrams, Schematics & Circuit Diagrams, Parts List (BOM), Layout Diagrams, Core/Firmware and Software/API.They say that each level can be open sourced, but the exact nature of what it means to open it varies:
In practice, not every layer is fully open. Often only a subset of the layers are released, documented, or open source. 7th layer might be materials…
Something to monitor.
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