Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
change you'd like to see and rely on the original designer to re-create it for themselves, if
desired, rather than providing a digital encoding of the change that can be automatically
previewed and merged. This lack of easy methods for merging the efforts of multiple indi-
viduals reduces the viability of peer production for electronic circuits.
A final obstacle to centralized collaboration is the complications relating to the role of
money and business in the production of hardware. When developers have to invest
money and time in making and testing changes to the design of a circuit, they may be mo-
tivated to recoup those investments by selling their own version of a product rather than
contributing their changes back to the original producer. This can create confusion around
identity and branding as well, as it can become challenging to distinguish between boards
of similar or identical design from different producers. As a result of these complications,
Arduino has trademarked the Arduino name, using it to identify only products made by
the company. This decision was initially contentious but since seems to have become an
accepted practice.
The Arduino ecosystem also points out the importance of open sourcing the comple-
ments to the hardware itself. Because the Arduino software is open source (as are its un-
derlying software tools), it gives the makers of derivatives a platform that people can use
to program their boards. This factor has slowly pushed the Arduino software to become
ever more general; it originally supported only a single AVR processor, then spread to
most of the AVR product line, and now can support multiple processors with completely
different architectures. This provides a uniform, centralized software platform for the
whole ecosystem of derivatives. It also allows others to customize the software along with
the hardware, adopting it to both specific uses and available resources. Online documenta-
tion (especially if liberally licensed) also makes it easier to support a new board, as that
product doesn't need to be documented from scratch. This open source software and docu-
mentation, combined with accessible circuit board fabrication and electronic components,
together yields a healthy ecosystem of Arduino derivatives and alternatives.
It's not clear what the relative importance of these various factors has been in promot-
ing the vibrant Arduino ecosystem that exists today. Certainly, the Arduino software is
more sophisticated (and, therefore, would be more difficult to re-create from scratch) than
the basic Arduino circuits—and, in many cases, the derivative circuit designs have been
re-created from scratch rather than derived from the files for the original Arduino. In the-
ory, if the Arduino software were simply flexible and extensible, but not actually open
source, it could still support a variety of derivatives of the Arduino hardware. In practice,
it seems clear that many of the improvements that have been contributed to the software
(including those for better support of third-party hardware) have relied in various ways on
the fact that the code for the software is available. It's hard to guess which kinds of ex-
tensibility people will need, and we probably would have done a bad job if we had tried to
