10 Facts About Open hardware

The term usually means that information about the Open hardware is easily discerned so that others can make it – coupling it closely to the maker movement.

Open-source hardware helps alleviate the issue of proprietary device drivers for the free and open-source software community, however, it is not a pre-requisite for it, and should not be confused with the concept of open documentation for proprietary hardware, which is already sufficient for writing FLOSS device drivers and complete operating systems.

Open hardware launched the Open Hardware Certification Program, which had the goal of allowing hardware manufacturers to self-certify their products as open.

The FreeIO project advocated the concept of Free Hardware and proposed four freedoms that such Open hardware provided to users, based on the similar freedoms provided by free software licenses.

The designs gained some notoriety due to Martin's naming scheme in which each free Open hardware project was given the name of a breakfast food such as Donut, Flapjack, Toast, etc.

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However, as more and more non-electronic hardware products are made open source, this term tends to be used back in its broader sense of "physical product".

The field of open-source hardware has been shown to go beyond electronic hardware and to cover a larger range of product categories such as machine tools, vehicles and medical equipment.

New Open hardware licenses are often explained as the "Open hardware equivalent" of a well-known OSS license, such as the GPL, LGPL, or BSD license.

One of the major differences between developing open-source software and developing open-source hardware is that hardware results in tangible outputs, which cost money to prototype and manufacture.

Recently, many open-source hardware projects were funded via crowdfunding on Indiegogo or Kickstarter.