Thoughts on: Open Source Hardware: Opportunities and Challenges, June 2016
Five steps to developing the OSH ecosystem
The paper defines five steps required to develop the OSH ecosystem, briefly they are:
- Encourage individuals to contribute towards platforms and provide necessary design flows
- Make hardware design practical via easily available EDA tools and development platforms from industry
- More and more OSH components are developed, industry can leverage this critical mass
- OEMs introduce modular instrumentation that encourage customisation – for example open standards based designs
- Simplify agreements and licencing to grant the freedom to evolve to permit commercial and non-commercial use and contribution
This cycle will allow ideas to be generated and growth to be sustained in OSH, and gives academia/individuals and industry equal roles in it.
The paper gives us a lot of material to begin this journey, and now it falls to us in the industry to look around and see what we can contribute. For us, it is allowing devices to be interoperable so that these readily available components can be used together to encourage creativity.
Read the full paper or leave us a comment with your thoughts on this exciting time in industry and academia.