[Discuss] OSHWA creates one database to rule them all ...

[Bryan Bishop]

On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Michael Shiloh <michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com
> wrote:

> How do we encourage this? By modeling such behavior on our own projects.
> Any
> open project that has contains useful information should provide an API to
> that information.
>

So your suggestion is that each hardware project should run a server and
have a public API? That sounds a lot like the service discovery things from
the UDDI era. Service discovery and API discovery is itself not a bad
thing, but I think that expands the scope way too much. Consider a simple
alternative, like inserting an extra file for metadata into your project,
like "package.json" from the world of nodejs and npm. Off the top of my
head, this has the benefit of not requiring a hardware project maintainer
to run a server and API, it can be distributed right next to CAD files, and
works with basically all known text editors. This easily fits into the
existing version control repositories too. However, simple can sometimes be
the enemy of useful or good, so maybe this doesn't solve a use case you
were thinking of?

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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