My Hat's Off too: Open Hardware Movement

Sir Tim, creator of the World Wide Web, pointed to open data and linked data as exciting examples of the way that the Web is promoting transparency of information and looked forward to the time when the current 20 per cent of the world’s population who can access the Web grows to 80 per cent, with all the changes this will bring in terms of technological and social developments, and new possibilities of communication and cultural change.(bold added by me for emphasis)

Profiting from the Web has it's connotation here in this blog entry to mean, development of societies in regards to the knowledge based and development of individual to widen their boundaries of perspective.

Open Hardware Repository

"Designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware." It is hard to deny that enthusiasm is inspiring and that it can be one of the factors in the success of any enterprise. The statement comes from the Manifesto of the Open Hardware Repository (OHR), which is defined by its creators as a place on the web where electronics designers can collaborate on open-hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the movement for open-source software. Of course, there is more to this than the importance of enthusiasm. Feedback from peers, design reuse and better collaboration with industry are also among the important advantages to working in an open environment.Hardware joins the open movement

Just have to legally read License application in order to see that it is actually a concerted effort to such establishment of an Open Internet agenda ? Why is this important?

***

OHR Manifesto

The Open Hardware Repository is a place on the web for electronics designers to collaborate on open hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the free software movement. There are numerous advantages to working in a completely open environment:

• Peer review. If you are a designer in a somewhat small team, or even alone, you can get very useful feedback from others by exposing your ideas in an open space. Chances are somebody has similar interests to yours and more experience.
• Design reuse. The OHR has its origins (and initial scope) in the community of electronics designers working in experimental physics laboratories. One of its goals is to reduce the number of different teams working independently to solve the same problems, in order to make better systems with less time and effort.
• Better collaboration with industry. The current business model for most commercial design companies is to keep the details of design secret. While this might maximize the margins of some companies it has no advantage for the customers. We believe that a business model based on companies designing in the OHR and getting paid for it is perfectly feasible, and would result in better products and the possibility for the customer to improve them and debug them more effectively.
• Last but not least, designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware.

There are two different areas in the OHR:

• Project pages are under the responsibility of a given project leader. There are two requirements for any project to qualify for OHR support:
  • Everything needed to review and modify the design and to produce the final hardware must be published. This includes schematics and PCB layout in some human-readable open format, bill of materials, mechanical drawings, manufacturing files, etc. Submitting the electronics CAD files in case someone uses the same design software and wants to modify the design is also requested. A project leader is free to use any licensing scheme for a given design, provided it is compatible with the OHR goals stated in this document. Two good candidates for open design are the TAPR Open Hardware License and the CERN Open Hardware License.
  • The project must present an interest to the community of electronics designers for experimental physics facilities. This community being very wide and diverse, we don’t think this is a very troublesome constraint.
• OHR Support is a specific project devoted to the OHR itself. It contains useful information for users and any issue on OHR usage can be reported there.

We hope that the OHR will be a worthy contribution to a change in design paradigms and practices towards more openness and quality. See: http://www.ohwr.org/

 ***

CERN Open Hardware Licence

The CERN Open Hardware License was written for CERN designs hosted in the OHR and can also be used by any designer wishing to share design information using a license compliant with the OSHW definition criteria.

Access to the full text: CERN Open Hardware Licence.

It is important for "such distribution" to understand that the very development of internet through CERN and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as too, Cern being a birth place of internet. The origination of Internet Technologies as a development toward "advancing communication" other then corporate monopolistic control over the internet. Why,  non profit development detriment to not to consider it a  a right to all countries "access to information" with which to advance those societies?

To combat UBB and Vertical Integration. LHC development as a participation of many countries.

Cern must turn their views toward Canada and "current events" in order to understand the importance of such developments with regard to OHR Manifesto.If you can free the consumers/population in Canada then you can free the world to stopping advancing communications constraints and development toward a world population knowledge and developmental bottleneck..

Update: See Also: CERN brings hardware into the open

Make sure you check out the labels to learn some history