While open source practices have come to dominate the software industry, they’re still fairly new to hardware. Many open source hardware projects are now seeing some early success but there are still many challenges ahead, as the keynote speakers at LinuxCon and CloudOpen on Friday demonstrated.
MakerBot VP Anthony Moschella, Open Prosthetics Project Founder and Iraq war veteran Jonathan Kuniholm, and IBM Power Systems General Manager Doug Balog each had a unique take on open source hardware. But all agreed that open source principles will speed technological innovation whether it’s in 3D printing, prosthetics, or servers. Here are some of the successes and challenges they highlighted and the opportunities they presented for the open source community to get involved and make a difference.
1. MakerBot
The promise: An open source approach to 3D printing will allow makers and manufacturers to someday iterate on and create physical objects for their own purposes the way developers modify open source software today.
“This is the real innovation of 3D printing: the idea that objects themselves are not final,” said Moschella in his keynote.
Success: While MakerBot’s newest model, the Replicator 2 is no longer open source, MakerBot’s Thingiverse boasts a community of about 13,000 makers, designers and engineers who download and share open source designs for printed objects. The Robohand, for example, is a 3D-printable prosthetic hand for children who are continuously outgrowing their prosthetics and can’t afford to replace them. The open source design allowed for rapid iteration and improvements that made it easier to assemble and share.
Challenge: Consumer-focused 3D printing machines are largely limited to printing plastic toys and other small objects. Making useful, everyday objects is still uncommon, but it won’t always be. As a wider variety of objects can be printed, Moschella says that copyright will become a real issue.
