Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?

Wired

Check this out," Massimo Banzisays. The burly, bearded engineer wanders over to inspect a chipmakingrobot—a "pick and place" machine the size of a pizza oven. It hums withactivity, grabbing teensy electronic parts and stabbing them intoposition on a circuit board like a hyperactive chicken pecking forseeds. We're standing in a one-room fabrication factory used by Arduino, the Italian firm that makes this circuit board, a hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders.
the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free foranyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and his team have spent preciousbillable hours making the thing, and they sell it themselves for asmall profit — while allowing anyone else to do the same. They're notalone in this experiment. In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens ofhardware inventors around the world have begun to freely publish theirspecs. There are open source synthesizers, MP3 players, guitaramplifiers, and even high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You can buyan open source mobile phone to talk on, and a chip company called VIAhas just released an open source laptop: Anyone can take its design,fabricate it, and start selling the notebooks.

Banzi admits that the concept does sound insane. After all, Arduinoassumes a lot of risk; the group spends thousands of dollars to make abatch of boards. "If you publish all your files, in one sense, you'reinviting the competition to come and kill you," he says, shrugging.

Then again, Linux sounded pretty insane, too, back in 1991, when Linus Torvalds announced it.Nobody believed a bunch of part-time volunteers could create somethingas complex as an operating system, or that it would be more stable thanWindows. Nobody believed Fortune 500 companies would trust softwarethat couldn't be "owned." Yet 17 years later, the open source softwaremovement has been crucial to the Cambrian explosion of the Web economy.Linux enabled Google to build dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl andRuby have become the lingua franca for building Web 2.0 applications;and the free Web-server software Apache powers nearly half of all Websites in the world. Open source software gave birth to the Internetage, making everyone—even those who donated their labor—better off.

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