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  • Author Author: Jeff
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Open Source Hardware Success Factors

Which of the following factors are most critical to expanding the open source hardware movement? (log on to cast your vote!)

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  • Extremely wel placed question!

    Since I am in Open Source Hardware I allways wonder why the industry accepts Open Source Software – even contributes – but has so much problems with Open Source Hardware.

    I think it is a long way to learn for companies that they can make more money if they give their stuff away for free.

    Simple example:

    Why not open source reference designs?

    People will use it, see that it is better than something they can come up with. Use it in their designs, use it in their products. Build on top of it, provide free building blocks for problems.

    The manufacturer sees more designs using their parts, sells more parts – Bingo!

    Or do you think the Atmega shortage is unrelated to all the Arduino stuff?

  • in reply to Former Member

    I use to work for a semicondutor company and I always though it amusing that we would invest significant sums of money to create "development" platforms that were sold at a loss and had no hope of recouping investment - all so that we could design a chip into a customer project.  In many cases the development boards were written off as sales and marketing expense and yet we wouldn't enable the market to innovate with these boards.  I do see some manufacturers providing more support (TI, Atmel) but I'm not sure they know how to engage the innovation potential of open source hardware.

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  • in reply to Former Member

    I use to work for a semicondutor company and I always though it amusing that we would invest significant sums of money to create "development" platforms that were sold at a loss and had no hope of recouping investment - all so that we could design a chip into a customer project.  In many cases the development boards were written off as sales and marketing expense and yet we wouldn't enable the market to innovate with these boards.  I do see some manufacturers providing more support (TI, Atmel) but I'm not sure they know how to engage the innovation potential of open source hardware.

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