Don't eat the yellow snow
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Open source hardware is making big bucks
IT TURNS OUT that 13 companies are making millions from their open source hardware (OSHW) products.
Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried from the OSHW company Adafruit Industries gave a presentation at O'Reilly's Foo Camp East hacker conference held at Microsoft's campus near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The team put together a talk called "Million dollar baby - businesses designing and selling open source hardware, making millions."
"We make hardware and we give away the plans and we let people sell it and share it. And it turned out this is actually a really good business," Torrone told the attendees.
This year there are over 200 OSHW projects and Torrone and Fried claim OSHW products will be a billion dollar business by 2015.
Businesses making over one million dollars are Adafruit, Arduin, Bug Labs Chumby, Dangerous Prototypes, DIY Drones, Evil Mad Scientist Labs, Liquidware, Makerbot, Maker Shed, Parallex, Solarbotics and Sparkfun Electrontics. The companies produce everything from WiFi alarm clocks to kits for making your own military drones.
Like open source software, OSHW companies design products with an open license. Anyone can download and share their code, CAD files and circuit layouts. This means other companies or geekboys can mod and share the results - with a view to selling their kit.
"That's just 13 companies representing 50 million dollars on 200 projects with 300 coming up soon," said Torrone.
With those kinds of numbers, it seems possible that they might be on to something. µ
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SV Guy has got it right. "Open source" hardware does not carry the same connotations and weight that open source software does.
Also, many of the listed companies are not really providing valuable IP. With all due respect to the great hardware that Adafruit, Sparkfun, etc. produce, most of the "open source" hardware they provide consists of *support hardware* for accessing *closed-source* chips such as GPS receivers, AVR chips, etc. This is really not all that significant, as many of the datasheets of these closed-source chips come with ready-made example designs for creating the support hardware, some even come with PCB masks. What Adafruit, et al provide is easy access to chips and designs without having to create PCBs, surface-mount chips, and have a pick-and-place machine. With Arduino, it is also more valuable for its *firmware* and its software not its hardware.
Even with "real" open source hardware designs, such as those provided at OpenCores.org, most individuals do not have the means to really take advantage of them, short of programming their own FPGAs. Even then, it may just be easier and cheaper to buy a closed-source ready-made chip instead of, for example, settling for some old free MIPS processor core. That's really what most people end up doing, often prototyping with Sparkfun, etc.
Publishing plans and selling kits to hobbyists is hardly a new idea. Calling it "open source hardware" conveys the false impression that it could be as disruptive as open source software. This doesn't work because hardware distribution isn't free.
Except for finding someone to employ them in the brave new copyleft world. I suppose that's important. To them.
But a million dollars, as Dr. Evil discovered in [Austin Powers], is not so
much money any more. I see they (not Dr. Evil) are hoping to break one billion as a whole industry valuation, five years from now...
But then, I suppose keeping down the cost is the point...
...and is this including open-source business of for instance IBM ...