Open Source Hardware

Wired recently had an article about the Arduino board. Open source software is not a new concept to me, but this one was. Here is a quick explanation about it from the Wired article:

That’s because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and his team have spent precious billable hours making the thing, and they sell it themselves for a small profit — while allowing anyone else to do the same. They’re not alone in this experiment. In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens of hardware inventors around the world have begun to freely publish their specs. There are open source synthesizers, MP3 players, guitar amplifiers, and even high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You can buy an open source mobile phone to talk on, and a chip company called VIA has just released an open source laptop: Anyone can take its design, fabricate it, and start selling the notebooks.

I continue to be flabbergasted at the continued success of these open source ideas. When most companies are so focused on making money at any cost, it is refreshing to see these open source companies have any kind of success. It breeds a sense of working together and collaboration. The reason open source pioneers like Linux and Apache have lasted so long is that the focus is on the best working product, not the bottom line.

I guess it doesn’t make a great “business plan” but I wish these kinds of companies were more prevalent in our society.  Or, the companies that already exist had some sense of working together. As consumers, we deal with so many propiertary items and closed systems (hello…iPhone) that it feels like the only reason we are given the “choice” of buying all this extra gadgetry is to increase the stock prices.  Why can’t all the plugs I have just be universal? Why can’t I switch phone services without it being a huge ordeal? I guess all of this requires some cooperation on the part of the consumer, but I think we are entering a part of our history where we just can’t throw money at every consumer good that hits the market. With this kind of collaboration from company to company and company to consumer, I think we can have better consumer goods and more profitable companies. I guy can always dream…