[Discuss] EOMA68 Libre Hardware Standard and Libre Software project, currently crowd-funding (deadline expires 26th aug 2016)

[Paul Bristow]

But wait a minute.  I was involved in the OSWHA process and that is simply not the issue being addressed.  Saying that something is certified as Open Source Hardware has *nothing whatsoever* to do with any of the other certifications you may have to legally comply with when you sell a product.  In the EU, you have to CE mark a product you want to sell, which means a product complies to all applicable legislation.  Similar in the US and other jurisdictions.  The company selling the product is liable for it - particularly for any safety problems.  Self-certifying that a product complies with a certification process cannot possibly have the consequences you claim.  

If your process involves a specific gatekeeper role which certifies a product as being safe by testing then you will certainly have the liability problem, and had better be very well insured, but you definitely severely limit the number of participants in your ecosystem to those that can afford it.

And having been involved in industrial ecosystems like this, I can tell you that very few "standards" that don't allow for independent testing, survive.  Companies just won't sign up to a process that requires them to disclose pre-launch information to a competitor. 

In short, the OSHWA tries to solve one problem.  It does not attempt to solve the issue of product safety which has its own legislation for different types of products.

I am involved with some open source humanitarian projects and this is an issue for distributed digital fabrication - how do you tell that physical components that have been 3D printed, welded, or cnc'd meet the necessary physical characteristics - but that can't be solved with a single verification lab.  We'd need a distributed validation process.

Collaboratively, because I really like your project,

Paul

> On 22 Aug 2016, at 20:59, lkcl . <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Marcin Jakubowski
> <marcin at opensourceecology.org> wrote:
>> Come after "YOU" - the YOU refers to people who drew up the OSHWA standard?
> 
> .... yeah.  sorry that wasn't clear, but yes, sadly.  the argument
> used would probably go something like, "you just let people sign up to
> this without actually checking their credentials" - that would show a
> chain of culpable negligance and possibly even open up the people who
> drew up the OSHWA standard to charges of 3rd degree manslaughter.
> 
> now, whether that's actually true or not would be irrelevant to any
> people who were in stages of grief / shock /
> looking-for-someone-to-blame, so it's something that really needs to
> be thought through.
> 
> the way that i'm dealing with it is: you don't get an "automatic
> signup".  you have to go through a Certification process.  people who
> are doing commercial (non-libre) hardware would be required to pay,
> and those that are doing libre hardware would not.  either case
> they'll have to provide working samples for interoperability testing.
> 
> now, it's slightly different for the EOMA standards because it's a
> split modular design so it's REALLY important that hardware
> interoperability testing and safety checks be carried out, but imagine
> the case where somebody slaps an OSHWA label on some
> shoddily-assembled hardware with a faulty PSU.  or builts a
> battery-charger that has an OSHWA label on it where they've NO IDEA of
> the safety issues associated with overheating on lithium batteries.
> 
> i'm really sorry for not knowing of the OSHWA efforts before
> otherwise i would have raised these issues during the standard's
> development, having had to think them through already for EOMA
> standards.
> 
> l.
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