Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Benefits of OSHW for the Academic
The benefits of open source hardware in academia include improved research and teaching
for the professional development of the professor.
OSHW in Research
Theoriginalandongoingpurposeofuniversitieswastospreadknowledge,yet—inaniron-
ic twist—information sharing from research faculty members is now often restricted. At
many institutions, there is considerable pressure on professors to lock down intellectual
property (IP) into the anti-commons by patenting and or commercializing research to pre-
vent its use without the university making a profit (Lieberwitz, 2005). Although the legit-
imacy of IP (even as a concept) is highly contested within academia (Boldrin and Levine,
2008), the well-documented influence of corporate thought on universities has propagated
an intellectual monopoly view of research even in what was once the free academic liter-
ature (Chan and Fisher, 2008). This can make it difficult to replicate experiments and may
even potentially “threaten the foundation of scientific discourse” (Gelman, 2012). Current
practices of (1) holding back key information until patent applications are filed, (2) using
closed standards, (3) maintaining a lack of universal open access to the literature, and (4)
treating course information (e.g., syllabi, homework problems, lectures, learning aids) as
proprietary information all hurt academic communication and directly hamper innovation,
education, and progress. This last point is perhaps best driven home by Nobel Prize winner
Eric Maskin and his co-author James Bessen (2009), who found that when discoveries are
“sequential” (such that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its prede-
cessors), patent protection discourages innovation.
Although this is common knowledge in academia, academics must walk the line care-
fully before tenure even though their natural tendencies and the history of academia are
much more in line with the hacker ethic that underpins the development of free open
source software (FOSS) (Levy, 1984) and now open source hardware. The combination of
the hacker ethic with the general principles of sharing, openness, decentralization, free ac-
cess, and world improvement creates an ethic that professors in general would support.
This philosophy is enabled by the gift culture of open source, in which recognition of an
individual is determined by the amount of knowledge given away (Bergquist and Ljung-
berg, 2001)—a perspective identical to that found in the academic culture. In a gift eco-
nomy, the richer you are, the more you give; the more valuable the gift, the more respect
you gain. This is the real currency: respect. For academics, their contributions are ac-
knowledged through the formal process of peer review to gain respect in the literature and
by giving presentations at professional conferences. The more we give away and the more
valuable it is scientifically, the better off are our careers.
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