Re: [ox-en] Report from OKCon 2011

On Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:55:41 +0200, Stefan Merten <[email protected]> wrote:
> When I compare the current state of what I see in Open Hardware
> movement with the history of Free Software then I'd say we are
> somewhere around 1987. I.e. the Linux kernel has not yet been invented
> and it's still twelve years until the general breakthrough of this
> stuff. I'm really curious what will happen here.

A side note: there is another parallel here. Before Richard Stallman
evangelised the term "free software" with his specific meaning in mind,
source code was frequently passed around between universities - and even
by AT&T - without proprietary software licenses attached. This was
simply done as a matter of course, without perhaps much thought, as the
economic value of exploiting proprietary software either had not been
conceived of or was not of interest.

Similarly, I don't know much about the history of open hardware -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware doesn't even have a
section on it! - but I think that freely implementable schematics and
tutorials in magazines like Popular Electronics and others, would count
as early "open hardware", without the name attached. And without the
same awareness of being part of a social movement. (But perhaps I'm
wrong, and perhaps the awareness of the potential of open hardware that
we have now was realised by some hardware hackers very early on!)

I'd be very surprised if there were not other such examples.

Regards,
Robin
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