Open Source Hardware: Opportunities and Challenges, June 2016
The development community and hardware industry need to, as the paper states, ‘more vigorously’ collaborate in the open source ecosystem.
Encouraging participation from industry and academia
Interoperability is the first step to motivating contributes to OSH from both sides – making components work together easily will make the prospect of sharing more meaningful and simple.
Agility is the key to the success of Open Source Software (OSS),so we must look to this success to build OSH. We have a growing maker movement globally, where people want to build what they use, and this must be encouraged. The GoPro is a mainstream success story in OSH,and if we can motivate more individuals to design chips then we’ll see many more projects like this.
Academia should structure courses to incorporate OSH, and this will attract those students interested in hardware projects as well as speeding up the non-industry side of the OSH ecosystem.
Without industry the OSH movement can’t reach critical mass,however. After some hesitation industry did contribute to OSS which we can see was obviously beneficial.
We argue that making commodity, commonly used IP freely available will ultimately benefit the hardware industry.Proven IP from vendors, possibly enhanced by the open source community, and eventually maintained collectively, can dramatically lower the bar for developers to start new designs