Business - Building Open Source Hardware - page 278

source hardware depends on. When a physical object has prior art, it means another com-
pany should not be able to patent it.
“Have you had any products that have failed due to openness? 'Never. Our
products are rapidly developed and gaining traction in the market precisely be-
cause they are open, not in spite of it.'” (Aleph Objects)
As of 2014, no open source hardware company had reported to us that they failed due
to failure to protect its IP. In other words, the fact that it has open source IP has not been
why a company shut down. Companies shut down because of other business problems
that occur in closed source businesses as well, such as marketing, pricing, or hiring fail-
ures.
Collaboration and Synergies
Open source is about collaboration—about new decentralized collaboration patterns that
are possible with the Internet. Published plans can reduce the collaboration costs for some
things, synergies can be found more easily through transparency, and some things become
possible that weren't before. There are obvious ways that outside collaboration has helped
each and every open source hardware company. Look at how RepRap has grown, or how
many products at SparkFun are labeled “This project is in collaboration with ...” and lists a
collaborator.
However, one of the most promising synergies that comes with open source hardware
development as a result of its transparency is the possibility to collaborate, develop, and
organize complete recycling of a product or material. This is sometimes called closed ma-
terial cycles, regenerative design, Cradle to Cradle design, or zero-waste economy. There
are not yet examples in the world of successful closed material cycles that are using the
term “open source” to describe how they work. Instead, most of these projects use the
term “transparency” to express the fact that open communication made it possible to de-
velop and maintain closed loops and save resources.
Open source often means using or allowing use of open standards (for more on stand-
ardization, see Chapter 4 ) . In fact, open sourcing a technology is a common approach to
establish it as an open standard. Standards are helpful for collaboration between different
companies and work focusing on shared and complex goals (e.g., an ecological zero-waste
or circular economy). Open source is also about transparency and adds a whole new layer
on top that makes global material cycles even more likely. This is a very strong and inter-
esting potential on a worldwide scope for open source hardware, yet almost an entirely
unexplored potential for the future of open source hardware and open design. We will
likely see more of this trend in the future. Having transparency to the outside world also
means that you have transparency within your company. This can make in-house commu-