Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The First Programs, Organizations, and Definitions
In 1997, Bruce Perens (creator of the Open Source Definition, co-founder of the Open
Source Initiative, and a ham radio operator) launched the Open Hardware Certification
Program (Perens 1997). The goal of this program was to allow hardware manufacturers
to self-certify their products as open. This implied making a set of promises about the
availability of documentation for programming the device-driver interface of a specific
hardware device. The program was free, and vendors of certified equipment had the right
to apply the program's open hardware logo to their packaging and to state in advertising
that their devices were certified. In turn, those purchasers who bought certified equipment
were assured that a change in operating system or even the demise of the manufacturer
would not make it impossible to have new software written for their devices. The Open
Hardware Certification Program was one of the first attempts at extending software's open
source practices to hardware and, as part of this effort, Perens trademarked “open hard-
ware” and the domain openhardware.org, which he committed to the certification program.
Openhardware.org can be viewed through the Internet Archive as of January 2014:
ht-
In 1998, shortly after the launch of the Open Hardware Certification Program, David
Freeman announced the Open Hardware Specification Project (OHSpec), another attempt
at licensing hardware components whose interfaces are available publicly and creating an
entirely new computing platform as an alternative to proprietary computing systems
(Freeman 1998). Also in 1998, Troy Benjegerdes made public his intention of starting an
entrepreneurial venture to apply the principles of open source software to the design and
development of hardware (Benjegerdes 1998). In the same year, Reinoud Lamberts
launched Open Design Circuits, a website dedicated to collaboratively designing low-cost
and open design circuits (Lamberts 1998). Between 1998 and 1999, Graham Seaman
made several attempts at defining open source hardware (Seaman n.d.).
Despite the initial burst of activity around the nascent concept of open source hard-
ware, most of these initiatives faded out within a year or two. Only in the mid-2000s did
open source hardware again become a hub of activity. This was mostly due to the emer-
gence of several major open source hardware projects, such as OpenCores, RepRap, Ar-
duino, and companies such as Adafruit and SparkFun. Thus, in 2007, Perens reactivated
the openhardware.org website with the following statement:
Surprise! After a long dark period of being used to divert traffic to a bling
vendor, OpenHardware.org is back in the control of its founder. The domain
was created by me (Bruce Perens) to operate an Open Hardware certification
the time, Linux was not yet commercially accepted, and thus there wasn't tre-
