This Thursday, Hackaday and Tindie are going to be rolling into Denver to attend the 2017 Open Hardware Summit.
What’s the big draw for the Open Hardware Summit? The attendees, of course. These are the people who make all the cool bits and bobs in Open Hardware. [Prusa] will be there, Seeed will be there, OSH Park and OSH Stencils will be there (yeah, they’re different companies), BeagleBoard will be there, and Great Scott Gadgets will be there. This is the place you want to be if you want to meet the heroes of Open Hardware.
Of special interest at the Open Hardware Summit this year will be the state of certification talk. Last year, a certification process for Open Hardware was started. If you’re not aware, this is a nearly intractable problem. Copyright covers design files, not implementation, and design patents only cover ornamental fluff on the stuff that actually makes things go. Creating a certification for Open Hardware is exponentially harder than arguing over an Open Source license, and we’re excited to see how the first year of the Open Hardware Certification went.
If you’re going and hanging around in Denver until Friday, there’s a road trip being planned by Sparkfun to visit the awesome companies along the Front Range. The itinerary includes a trip to Sparkfun, lunch at a brewery, and a trip to Lulzbot. Basically, Sparkfun rented a bus. The deadline to RSVP passed long ago, but I’m renting a van for the Hackaday and Tindie crew, and I’m sure there’s going to be some overflow. After the event on Thursday, there will be a Women Who Hack Dinner and Drinks. Hackaday’s evil overlords are graciously providing the drinks and appetizer there.
In the spirit, maybe it should be an electric bus.
Most electric vehicles are more proprietary than those with combustion engines. The spirit is open hardware, not electrical things.
Can you imagine an open hardware bus full of hackers though? It’d be quicker to walk than wait while someone stopped it and insisted on tweaking something every few hundred yards…. :-D
Oh yeah, I forgot about Tindie lol. Probably a Mooltipass or two on there still ;).
I’ll be there as well – I’m living in Denver now :)
I’ll be happy to talk about https://hackaday.io/project/11779-shared-silicon if anybody interested ;)
Copyright and design patents are legal things. There is nothing legal backing these OSHW licenses. It does the OSHW community of volunteers a disservice to imply OSHW licenses are a legal thing or the certification thing is more than just a few people wanting it to be a legal thing.
IHMO
So… Did anything interesting happen?
Here it is Tuesday, 5 days later, and I haven’t seen ANYTHING from the usually vocal people who usually attend (Sparkfun, Adafruit, hackaday, emsl) – no video clips, no minutes, no slides, no announcements…
(I guess twitter was relative active with the occasional 140 characters and a photo. Bleh. #OSHDenver )