[OH Updates] announcing oshw.org soon

[phillip torrone]

hi folks,

there have been some very exciting developments over the last few days for the open source hardware community.

1. we will be able to use oshw.org and opensourcehardware.org - the domain of oshw.org is being transferred to ayah by the kind owner, per anderson. salim lakani is providing hosting for free for us and also had opensourcehardware.org. you can see a quick (draft) landing page at http://www.opensourcehardware.org until the dns is updated for oshw.org - we will make it an amazing resource.

2. we had a legal expert make sure we could all use open source hardware, we can! limor and i are footing the bill on this as a gift to the community.

3. we contacted the OSI to make sure our logo, which is somewhat based on the OSI logo was ok to use for oshw, it seems so! we now have access to them too, they are a GREAT group of people. we will likely work with them on some joint efforts promoting open source.

4.we have a candidate that may be able to devote time to making oshw.org a non-profit / foundation.

5. as we establish an entity we'll be able to many many more things, including offering a variety of choices for doing and supporting open source hardware. it will be a great resource, a way to promote and market oshw, patent pools, maybe legal advice, advocacy, the sky is the limit. actually it's not the limit since we will have open source hardware space projects!  our inclusive style is very approachable and welcoming to the growing number of people and companies that want to do and share oshw. we will be more than just electronics of course, we will have 3d printing, mechanical, etc. we will work with many different orgs like CERN, TAPR, OHANDA and the OSI.

i realize, we, as a community have been operating without a central place or entity, if we could do it all over, we would of course, but now we can get more buttoned up do just that! we all got here by doing great work, and now we can do more under a common banner. the best days of oshw are ahead as bunnie said :)

ayah is our informally elected leader. we trust her, respect her and she's demonstrated to everyone her commitment to all of us doing oshw. if there are any ownership of anything like domains, trademarks, etc, we'd like her to have it and then transfer anything to the oshw foundation/org once we have that.

we will send more updates as things get oshw.org cooking, we'll need everyone's help!

thank you!

cheers,
pt