A lot of these costs are considered expected cost of entrance to work on these types of projects, you’ll have a much larger base of people able to work on and understand future projects if you can create an affordable standardized toolset.

There have been examples in the past, obviously and like you say Dan L, its really a reaction to open source software that means that we have to define the same for hardware/products.

For me the fundamental characteristic of any open source movement is the sharing of instructions to make a product, which in the hardware case is almost always restricted by patents. There are numerous examples of open source collaborative projects already existing on the web (I’ve been logging the ones I find on my blog, zero-waste.blogspot.com) although they do tend to be lo-tech for the very reason of ease of replication. But there are some with bigger ambitions. I guess that things are sure to become more hi-tech as the ability to synthesise products directly from computer becomes more ubiquitous. In the mean time, all that need be done is to share the existing source code: engineering drawings and schematics, sketches, anything that defines the creation of an object and you’ve got an open source project. There are plenty of people who can interpret them, and I don’t think it need necessarily be any harder than it is for software programmers.

Collaboration and the tools needed for it is indeed an area which needs to be developed, but I think instructables and the like are already close. Patents, as you say are an existing standard for communicating concept but a nightmare to navigate. The media needed is already there whether it be engineering drawings, CAD files, photographs, but it is a meaningful framework in which to exchange them that is needed. A kind of sourceForge equivalent perhaps? (he said, not knowing sourceforge that well at all)

Nevertheless, there’s nothing to stop prospective innovators learning from reading patents: understanding how devices work, and spotting improvements that could be made, and either waiting until the patents expire, or applying the knowledge gained in another field entirely.

As you say, “Furthermore, hardware unlike software must be manufactured,” and I guess this means that the barriers to entry for open source hardware are much higher than for software. Anyone can copy and tweak and deploy open source software with nothing more than a computer, but until everyone has multi-functional desktop RP machines and CNC mills it’s a lot more difficult to do that with actual designs. You can provide the instructions (and that’s why Instructables is so great) but it still requires more equipment/time/capability to follow those instructions than it would do for software.

OK, so how can a business model be developed? Based on that ‘barrier to entry’ point, I think it comes down to this: even if every consumer product you buy had a full circuit schematic on the box, and a manual detailing exactly how to build it, most people would keep buying the products. They can’t make them themselves, or they can’t be bothered. They certainly are no threat to the manufactruers.

In the cases where vast numbers of people do enjoy tinkering with the products they buy (e.g. cars), it was certainly true until a few years ago that all the secrets of the car could be revealed with a bit of dismantling & rebuilding (and the aid of a helpful manual). And plenty of people have built businesses based on this: tuning, customising, restoring, rebuilding vehicles, all based on knowledge gained from examination and dismantling of existing hardware. Want collaborative development? Look at any classic car club or autojumble.

In this sense, we’ve had open source hardware for years staring us in the face, just as I believe the ‘free software’ idea only occurred to Richard Stallman when he saw that software was suddenly being locked up. Up to that point it had been assumed that code would be human-readable.

Pretty much all innovation relies on prior art, hence the ability to examine and understand that prior art. In the sense, all business that is based on innovation must be based on prior art. Therefore most ‘traditional’ hardware businesses are to a large extent ‘open source’, even if there is an artificial restriction in terms of patents.