“We get a question that has stumped our developers for days and we push it public and get a suggestion within five minutes,” says Sean Moss-Pultz, OpenMoko's founder and chief executive.Įven so, making a business out of open hardware is a notion that baffles many people. But what is in it for companies? One advantage is being able to draw upon the expertise of their users. This is the approach of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum-cleaner, based in Bedford, Massachusetts, for example.Įnthusiasts enjoy tinkering, and other users like being able to upgrade their devices with new software. “My philosophy is: I really like to publish as much as I can, but my gut feeling is that this is what we want to keep this in-house.” Some firms publish just enough information about their hardware for it to be reprogrammed, but not replicated. “The motherboard is our intellectual property-we have a secret sauce to make that,” says Gordon Kruberg, the firm's chief executive. Gumstix, which sells tiny computers to put into other devices, publishes the hardware specifications of all its products except for its motherboards. There can be limits to open-hardware companies' openness. Chumby Industries, based in San Diego, has the Chumby-a sort of computerised cushion with wireless internet access and a small touch-screen, which can be reprogrammed as an alarm clock, weather station, photo album and so on. Neuros is one example another is OpenMoko, based in Taipei, which has an open-source mobile-phone operating system and a mobile phone, the Neo1973. Now companies, and not just internet-based enthusiasts, are embracing the open-source hardware model. The open-source hardware trend is now growing fast, says Adrian Bowyer, a mechanical engineer at the University of Bath and the inventor of the RepRap. It was also when Sun Microsystems, a computer-maker, decided to publish the specifications of one of its microprocessors, the UltraSPARC T1. Some enthusiasts point to 2005 as a crucial year: that was when work began on devices such as the RepRap (a rapid-prototyping machine that will, its makers hope, be able to replicate itself) and the TuxPhone, an open, Linux-powered mobile-phone. But the open-hardware trend has been reborn in recent years, thanks to the rise of the internet and the success of open-source software. In some ways, open-source hardware is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s, when early computers were sold in kits or shipped with schematic diagrams to make it easier for users to customise them. Such advantages, they say, outweigh the drawbacks of exposing what are usually seen as corporate secrets. “You're talking the wisdom of crowds with the control of the corporation.” Companies, for their part, say an open approach can help them get to market quickly with products that give customers what they want-without the need for market research. “The destiny of the product has been turned over to the user base,” he says. This opens the way to a new model for product development, suggests Seth Talley, the owner of a Chumby, another open-source device. “It's harder for my device to get antiquated,” says Aaron Crum, an OSD user, “and I don't have to buy another $200 device next year.” To access this new feature, users simply had to download a software patch. Neuros made the OSD's technical specifications available, and a group of users then wrote software to add a new feature that many users had requested: the ability to stream video from the OSD to another device across the internet. Even if all the details needed to build something are available, few people will have the tools or the inclination to do so.Ī good example is the OSD, a “media fridge” made by Neuros Technology of Chicago which acts as a repository of video from DVDs, camcorders, cable boxes and so on. It refers to an emerging class of electronic devices, for which the specifications have been made public, so that enthusiasts can suggest refinements, write and share software improvements, and even build their own devices from scratch. Some day, perhaps, fabricating machines will be able to transform digital specifications (software) into physical objects (hardware), which will no doubt lead to a vibrant trade in specifications, some of which will be paid for, and some of which will be open-source.īut until that day, the term “open-source hardware” is being used in a narrower sense. Modifying source code and then distributing a new, improved version of a program is much easier than improving and sharing the design of, say, an open-source motorbike. The open-source model cannot be directly carried over to hardware, because software can be duplicated and distributed at almost no cost, whereas physical objects cannot. Now the same approach is being applied to hardware, albeit in a modified form.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |