Margery Conner of EDN interviews Dangerous Prototypes founder,Ian Lesnet. He discusses the advantages of Open Source Hardware:
via Adafruit
More hereWhat’s the appeal of OSH to a hardware start-up? Is there a problem with losing your IP [intellectual property]— your design? Why would you want to expose that IP?
A: We take as much as we give. We build on work that others have done, and it gives us a jump-start on our design. For example, for Dangerous Prototypes’ [new] logic analyzer, someone has put hundreds of hours of work into its code. All I did was design a PCB for it. The original code was written for a generic development platform. We wondered about the cheapest piece of hardware that could run this code. We ended up using a PIC microcontroller and Xilinx FPGAs and PLDs. They’re programmed with software that’s available for free—not necessarily open source, but free—so anyone can compile our source code. There’s no barrier for anyone else to do it.
If someone wants to take the time, energy, and money to make my things and sell them and, in doing so, publicize my company, why should I stop them? Even if we wanted to, we’re too small. I’m not going to hire a lawyer to go after someone; I don’t even have the time to write a nasty letter.
via Adafruit
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