Open Source Hardware Success Factors

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?

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?

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.

To be honest, I see it as a new name for something that has been around since year 1. Much of what we as design engineers do is direct from the application notes, data sheets, or in some way "borrowed" from existing concepts, or what we learned at university, and so inherently 'open' anyway. It is the combination of software, hardware and packaging that becomes the protectable product. It is very rare that a hardware design is so innovative that it is protectable itself, rather it is the PCB, enclosure and other physical implementations that are.

Open Source Hardware exists purely as a gimmick to sell something else, quite often PCBs or a fully manufactured product. If the open hardware philosophy is taken to the obvious extreme, I see the inevitable result as being people seeing hardware engineering as trivial, and something that is so simple that it is given away. Although I have to that I think this will not happen, as the open concept will just fade along with all the other marketing buzz-words and trends.

Edited to add: No, I think the Atmel shortage is down to using external fab houses (correct me if I am wrong here). These are now prioritising high-profit and high-value customers such as Apple and related suppliers. This means that production runs keep getting bumped back down the timetable. Manufacturers are also keeping smaller inventories which makes supply problems more likely down the chain.