Hardware Reference
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mendous demand for such a program. I think only Cyclades registered while I
was connected with the program. I passed management of the program to Vin-
cent Renardias to operate as part of SPI. I think Vincent may have allowed the
domain to go inactive after that, or passed it to someone else who allowed that
to happen. Somehow SPI managed to let the domain expire—I assume not de-
liberately, but SPI was asleep at the switch for long enough that the domain
was on registrar hold for some time and then was allowed to expire. The do-
main was then picked up by some sort of search engine optimizer/domain
squatter and used to provide ersatz traffic (that is traffic intending to get the
previous site) to HipHopCapital.com , a bling vendor, for several years.
1 . SPI is a nonprofit organization created to help other organizations develop and distribute open
hardware and software. It encourages programmers to use any license that allows for the free
modification, redistribution, and use of software, and hardware developers to distribute docu-
mentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product. See http://spi-inc.org/ .
I used a domain capture service, a little money, and several years of patience to
pick up the domain again. It was transferred to the ownership of Perens LLC on
September 2, 2007 (US-Pacific time). I feel that I have to take responsibility for
making OpenHardware work this time rather than leaving it for others to drop the
ball.
The domain will be operated by techp.org (a not-for-profit organization that I
operate for Open-Source-related activities) and used to operate an Open Hard-
ware certification program again according to my original goals. I trust it will have
more demand now. (Perens 2007)
Four years later, openhardware.org would house an organization by the same name.
But the first Open Hardware Foundation came out of the Open Graphics Project (an effort
to design, implement, and manufacture a free and open 3D graphics chip set and reference
graphics card). Realizing that the initial run of Open Graphics chips would cost approxim-
ately $2 million to manufacture, Timothy Miller, founder of the Open Graphics Project,
decided to create an offshoot company called Traversal Technology. One of Miller's con-
cerns was how the company would interact with the project's community and suggested
the creation of an organization to safeguard the interests of the Open Graphics Project
community (McNamara 2007a). Thus, Patrick McNamara founded the Open Hardware
Foundation (OHF) in 2007, in partnership with Traversal Technology, with the goal of fa-
cilitating the design, development, and production of free and open hardware. Another
goal of the OHF was to help fund the production of open graphics products by providing
Traversal Technology with a known number of sales. Traversal Technology benefited by
having less financial risk associated with producing the graphics chip, and the open source
community benefited by having hardware available at reduced or no cost for developers
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