[Discuss] [DIYbio] Fwd: The institutionalization of OSHW

[Tim Schmidt]

And as far as an OSHW definition goes, what's wrong with "all the
information necessary to reproduce the device, including but not
limited to the files which describe the device itself, software or
firmware which runs on the device, and any software necessary for
consuming said files."

With the basic point being that it's not free unless we can distribute it.

When you 'apt-get install reprap' or the like - we should install the
reprap CAD files, but those files should depend on OpenSCAD, the
Arduino IDE (in the case of the firmware files) and so on.  If a file
is saved in Solidworks format, we can't exactly apt-get that
dependency.  So it goes in a different repo akin to Debian's contribs
repo (for packages which themselves are free, but which have non-free
dependencies).

In fact, the more I think about this, the more I think OSHW should
just be packaged alongside our favorite applications in our favorite
linux distributions.  Packaging for Windows and Linux should use
whatever package manager is popular on those platforms at the moment.

--tim