Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
nication and collaboration much easier. Ensuring that all information is accessible to all
people prevents hierarchy and secrecy problems from hindering collaboration.
Most of these considerations have a connection to sustainability. Openness can make it
easier and possible to organize an ecological economy with closed material cycles. Open
innovation processes might be essential for the future development and spreading of eco-
logical or sustainable products. Sustainability is perceived as valuable; in fact, many cus-
tomers are asking for such products or companies that support sustainability. Being on the
road to sustainability provides many businesses with more opportunities to do better busi-
ness—for example, to meet governmental regulations or recycling standards.
Ethical Bonus for the Brand
It is not difficult to understand that producing open source hardware might deliver an eco-
logical bonus. However, this aspect of open source development has nothing to do with
intellectual property, but rather is a side effect of open source transparency. Open source
hardware and open design are still very young and unknown to many people, so there are
some good prospects for growth. The more popular narratives today—“Open source is for
free” and “Open source means do it yourself”—will clearly be outgrown. “Open source
means lower quality/usability” will lose ground, too. Whatever the successful new narrat-
ives will be—perhaps “Open source is for sustainability,” “Open source is for freedom,”
or “Open is a smart choice”—chances are high that they will have positive spins. “I think
open source could be the next organic or fair trade,” the journalist Christoph Gurk said in
a conversation with me. Almost everything you can say about open source is valued by
people and considered a good thing. The bigger and better the movement grows, the more
attractive the brand strategy will be with open source hardware.
Strongly tied to open source development are inputs from the community view. Open
source products address and include people as intelligent, creative, caring and responsible
co-creators of the world. They educate and enable people rather than looking at them as
mindless consumers. Open source provides a lot of new and unique strategies for achiev-
ing a sustainable world and economy.
To get serious on another level for a second, closed things are progressively suspected
to be unsustainable and work against the consumer. Open source is about giving you the
freedom to understand and control your technology at a fundamental level. Closed devices
may not give you the option to repair them. Closed devices may collect information about
you and send it to anyone for whatever reason. They might also receive orders from
someone else with the goal of manipulating you with wrong information. If they are
closed, you will never have the chance to determine whether they are or are not doing this.
Such a statement might sound like a conspiracy theory today, but the more complex and
