CERN brings hardware into the open

It good to see great minds think alike?:)

The Open Hardware Repository was inspired by the success of open-source software. (Image courtesy CERN.)

Hardware and software go hand in hand – one doesn’t work without the other. Despite being so closely linked, the two industries operate very differently. For the most part, hardware is produced in isolation and product designs are concealed by manufacturers, while software is created in a largely open and collaborative environment, available for anyone to use.

Javier Serrano, a hardware designer for accelerator systems at CERN, set out to change that. Three years ago, his software design colleagues were developing device drivers – the interface between a piece of hardware and software applications – with the Linux open-source operating system. Serrano noticed that they enjoyed being part of a community where they had access to high-quality products and could seek help whenever they needed it. CERN brings hardware into the open

See Also: My Hat's Off too: Open Hardware Movement

Take Note: Make sure you check out the labels to learn some history.


Kernel (Mar 09 2006 Wikipedia)

In computer science the kernel is the core of an operating system. It is a piece of software responsible for providing secure access to the machine's hardware and to various processes (computer programs in a state of execution).

It's good to see where such thoughts originated at Cern with regard to this subject. This issue is one which I had proposed sometime ago in terms of broad band development as a non profit in order to establish some competition to what has become monopolistic control over the internet in Canada.  It is with the full compliance of the CRTC which supposedly is to represent some fairness to the internet and consumers, which it does not.

Linux (Mar 09 2006 Wikipedia)

Linux is a computer operating system and its kernel. It is one of the most prominent examples of free software and of open-source development; unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows, all of its underlying source code is available to the public for anyone to freely use, modify, improve, and redistribute.

I was able to detect product(Bell, Shaw, Telus,) development around internet usage according to UBB, while there were still methods that these companies were "fully aware of"  back tens years ago that allowed such easy connections in terms of wireless internet?

The Cathedral and the Bizarre by Jeff Lewis(through use of Wayback Machine)

The problem there is that the 'capitalist trench' problem is just as real in OpenSource as it is in commerical product: once a group buys into a specific solution, the cost of changing grows with time. That's true even if the software is 'free' because the maintenance costs and time to convert to another solution are not

Update:New link supplied

These thoughts for me go back to the ideas around Netscape and Microsoft when Microsoft was trying to be the based software on computers placed into the market.