The Truth About Open Source Hardware Business Models | Open Electronics

The Truth About Open Source Hardware Business Models | Open Electronics

Been working through week's fairly interesting accounts of the burgeoning open hardware movement. Basically, I tend to believe that there are obvious advantages to open collaboration, regardless of the matter (or lack thereof) at hand. But, less obviously but no less importantly, organising the open networks so that there is actually something produced that can be added to after the initial wave of enthusiasm, is both hard and harder than it seems at first. It's one thing to have a band of enthusiasts working night and day on release 1.0. It's another to have a sustained effort so that 1.0 leads to 2.0, and so on. History, one might note, is blotted by the faded (if not failed) efforts that never caught on.

What makes things catch on is, for the market capitalist, kind of like asking, What do women want?, where "women" is all of us as consumers. The answer is of course that we want "want," or neverending desire--not even, I suppose, the ability to act on it. Just the desire itself--up to a point. At some point, terminally anorexic with the infinity of desire, we die.