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Open-hardware-graveyard.md (2772B)

    

  1. ---
  2. title: The past and future of open hardware
  3. date: 2022-07-25
  4. ---
  6. They say a sucker is born every day, and at least on the day of my birth, that
  7. certainly may have been true. I have a bad habit of spending money on open
  8. hardware projects that ultimately become vaporware or seriously under-deliver on
  9. their expectations. In my ledger are EOMA68, DragonBox Pyra, the Jolla Tablet
  10. — which always had significant non-free components — and the Mudita
  11. Pure, though I did successfully receive a refund for the latter two.[^1]
  13. [^1]: I reached out to DragonBox recently and haven't heard back yet, so let's
  14.   give them the benefit of the doubt. EOMA68, however, is, uh, not going so well.
  16. There are some success stories, though. My Pine64 devices work great —
  17. though they have non-free components — and I have a HiFive Unmatched that
  18. I'm reasonably pleased with. Raspberry Pi is going well, if you can find one
  19. — also with non-free components — and Arduino and products like it
  20. are serving their niche pretty well. I hear the MNT Reform went well, though by
  21. then I had learned to be a bit more hesitant to open my wallet for open
  22. hardware, so I don't have one myself. Pebble worked, until it didn't. Caveats
  23. abound in all of these projects.
  25. What does open hardware need to succeed, and why have many projects failed?
  26. And why do the successful products often have non-free components and poor
  27. stock? We can't blame it all on the chip shortage and/or COVID: it's been an
  28. issue for a long time.
  30. I don't know the answers, but I hope we start seeing improvements. I hope that
  31. the successful projects will step into a mentorship role to provide
  32. up-and-comers with tips on how they made their projects work, and that we see a
  33. stronger focus on liberating non-free components. Perhaps Crowd Supply can do
  34. some work in helping to secure investment[^2] for open hardware projects, and
  35. continue the good work they're already doing on guiding them through the
  36. development and production processes.
  38. [^2]: Ideally with careful attention paid to making sure that the resulting device does not serve its investors needs better than its users needs.
  40. Part of this responsibility comes down to the consumer: spend your money on free
  41. projects, and don't spend your money on non-free projects. But, we also need to
  42. look closely at the viability of each project, and open hardware projects need
  43. to be transparent about their plans, lest we get burned again. Steering the open
  44. hardware movement out of infancy will be a challenge for all involved.
  46. Are you working on a cool open hardware project? [Let me know][0]. Explain how
  47. you plan on making it succeed and, if I'm convinced that your idea has promise,
  48. I'll add a link here.
  50. [0]: mailto:sir@cmpwn.com