[Discuss] The institutionalization of OSHW

[Catarina Mota]

I'm seriously sleep deprived, so take this with a grain of salt :)

Perhaps we should stop using the expression "OSHW company." Otherwise,
we'll end up having to determine what percentage of a business's products
must be OHSW for that company to be considered open source. We don't need a
company certification process, not right now I think.

While I agree that some people behaved shamefully last week, let's keep in
mind that they're a handful of individuals. Yesterday we stuffed almost 500
people in a warehouse to discuss controversial issues and everyone (as far
as know) behaved beautifully. So much so that the Eyebeam team complimented
us on being unusually friendly, respectful and upbeat. Many sponsors,
speakers and attendees showed up early (some of them were 2 days early)
and, instead of taking a seat, rolled up their sleeves and started
deploying chairs and picking up trash - yup, we put CEOs on trash duty
:) The outpour of love and support in our inbox and twitter stream today
has been one of the most moving things I've experienced. So while we can't
condone rudeness and disrespect, we should also celebrate the majority that
is so kind and supportive.


On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 10:04 PM, phillip torrone <pt at oreilly.com> wrote:

> 2 weeks ago i got the usual once-a-month "purity" email from some random
> person saying "you're not open source because you use quickbooks, or
> windows, or EAGLE" etc.. but now this week adafruit along with sparkfun is
> back to being a "good example of an open source hardware" company.
>
> i read your post and you say "Ok fine, I understand the need to discourage
> knock-offs.  But if you do this you are NOT 100% Open Source Hardware." -
>
> ok, but really, who is or isn't open source enough this week?
>
> is sparkfun 100%, is adafruit 100%, what about EMSL? they have a kit
> that's not OSHW, so does everyone else who i consider an oshw company. are
> we pure enough?
>
> our company statement, actually, limor's is "we're going to keep shipping
> OSHW while everyone argues about open source hardware". we're going to keep
> doing open source, we'll show that's an amazing cause and an amazing
> business, smart people will want to join us.
>
> last week the most vocal voices in the open source 3d printing community
> didn't inspire anyone to want to join their cause, in fact a 3d printer
> maker told me "wow, glad we never did (or will do open source). that's the
> worst thing i think, people steering clear of open source because of a
> "damned if you do, damned if you don't?
>
> i really don't know what's next, but i'm thinking about. for now,  i'm
> really excited about the OSHWA, because they're a group of people that has
> the mission to celebrate OSHW companies, i'd like to know i can work hard
> and someone *else* is going to say "these folks are doing OSHW, support
> them".
>
> i'm going to do my best to get them members and help them celebrate oshw.
>
> join in :)
>
> cheers,
> pt
>
>
>
> On Sep 28, 2012, at 2:07 PM, Andrew Stone <stone at toastedcircuits.com>
> wrote:
> As I listened to the OSHW summit speakers, I felt a pretty disturbing
> trend towards closing aspects of some products, and "yes-sirring" both real
> and "fake" regulatory bodies (as opposed to reluctantly complying) by the
> well-regarded members of our community.  And then of course there were lots
> of great presentations of cool stuff that completely disregarded all that.
> >
> > Looks like some of us are growing up :-(.  Did you feel that way?
> >
> > My full blog posting:
> http://effluviaofascatteredmind.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-institutionalization-of-oshw.html
> >
> > Cheers!
> > Andrew
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> > http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
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