[OH Updates] Open-Source Hardware As a Business Model, a Marketing Tactic, or a Feature

[Steven Bible]

Some thoughts...

If one of the goals of OH is to reduce/remove obsolescence (example, company goes out of business), the amount of information needed to repair/reproduce said product would require a service manual (of sorts). Simply having the source files (code, hardware) would not be enough. 

Take for example the service manual for an automobile, television set, you-name-it.  In it are disassembly instructions, tune up procedures, how the circuit/gears works.  Simply having a schematic, Gerbers, machine drawings one would still have to figure out how the darn thing works - in other words, reverse engineer. 

Under present discussions of what is necessary for calling something an OH project, I don't know if a service manual (of sorts) has been mentioned.  There's been a lot of discussion on what needs to be included to "reproduce" a product, not what it would take to "repair" a product.

Writing a service manual would not be a trivial exercise :-)

- Steve


-----Original Message-----
>From: Javier Serrano <Javier.Serrano at cern.ch>
>Sent: Sep 28, 2011 2:19 PM
>To: Chris Church <thisdroneeatspeople at gmail.com>
>Cc: updates at lists.openhardwaresummit.org
>Subject: Re: [OH Updates] Open-Source Hardware As a Business Model, a Marketing Tactic, or a Feature
>
>On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 12:24 -0500, Chris Church wrote:
>> Their main complaints are that the company that produced it has
>> largely gone inactive, but they've got systems everywhere and the
>> people who know it well enough to keep it running and fix problems are
>> dwindling in numbers as they retire.  Being open-source, they know
>> that if enough systems get sold, a third-party will come in to provide
>> support and upgrades if we decide to get out of the business.
>
>I got a call from the OPEES people the other day
>(http://www.opees.org/). They are solving the same obsolescence problems
>in embedded software with a FOSS approach and they think OSHW might be
>an important theme in the future for them as well. They told me some big
>companies like Airbus are part of their team.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Javier
>
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