 Thank you all for coming out to OHDC, Open Source Hardware comes to Washington, DC. I'm Michael Weinberg, I work for Public Knowledge. Before I start, I want to first thank a couple of people. First, Congressman Mike Doyle, who has secured us both this room and the four-year downstairs, which is where all the demonstrations are going to go on. And Kamala Kovacs, who is in his office and who also secured us all of these things. So I very much appreciate that. Also in the PK offices of Wendy Tonkin Myers, Clarissa Ramon, and also Luisa Gibb, who really just helped me get all of us together and put it all together. And all the panelists and participants who came down, because this is an event that is really designed to showcase a fantastic community and you cannot showcase a fantastic community without parts of that community to come and showcase. So as many of you probably know, Public Knowledge as an organization here in Washington, we're really focused on protecting consumers and advocating for consumers on digital issues. And a lot of the time that gets a little bit into policy weeds. We do a lot of copyright stuff, we do a lot of network stuff, communication stuff. It's great, we love it, but it's very intense. It leads to very long detailed filings of the FCC or arguments for the Copyright Office or here in Congress. And so it's really nice every once in a while to be able to step back from some of those day-to-day policy battles and think a little bit more about the future and what's coming down and what people are doing outside of Washington and what kind of great innovation is on its way. And that's what this event is about today. Open Source Hardware is, and we will have a panel that explains a little bit what it is in detail and then talk a little bit about the people who are doing it and even the people who are finding a way to have open businesses and open source hardware businesses. And I want you to keep in mind that one of the things that drives Open Source Hardware, and I'm sure that I am saying this wrong and will be corrected later, there is a feeling that it is important to share. It's important to make things available so that other people can learn and understand from it. But that's not just an altruistic motivation. It's not just sharing for sharing's sake, although there's a lot of value for sharing's sake. There's sharing because there's a recognition that when you share and when you do things openly and collaboratively, you bring more people into the process and you end up with better things. You end up with better projects with better products. And you bring more people in, which means that you get projects and products that people couldn't even have imagined who were in this small room who started with you. So when you think about this today, think of it as a great group of people and a great collection of movement that is really trying to do some interesting collaborative things. But don't think of it as this charitable enterprise that's just doing it for its own sake. Although again, there's a lot of value in that and that shouldn't be overlooked. But really it's a different way of putting together and innovating and doing it in a way that makes a better role for all of us. So with that, I will let our first panel come on up and please join me in welcoming them. Thanks everybody for coming and thank you Michael for putting this on. It's amazing. So my name is Alicia Gibb. I've worked in open hardware for the past four years both as a user and a producer. I'm currently an advocate for the community working on incorporating the open source hardware association which you will probably hear today referred to as Oshawa. And Oshawa is a dedicated stewardship to the movement and what we hope to do is set forth some best practices and education about what open source hardware is. I'm going to give you guys a couple definitions so that everybody's kind of on the same page moving into this. First of all, open hardware. So what is it? It's community defined, which the community definition was led by Aya Badir who's coming in the second panel. And I'm just going to read to you a little bit about the community definition. So this is by the community for the community. Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly by anyone or so anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or hardware based on that design. And I also want to make sure that everybody understands the word open is sometimes also sort of transferred with the word free and when we say that we mean free as in freedom, not as in the monetary value because hardware is made with resources and atoms rather than bits, they tend to be commercialized products. So another way to look at it is we give away the design files, the IP and we sell the atoms. Hardware, what is hardware? So even though this community started in the electronics movement, there have been a great number of communities that have joined us. So at this point hardware is anything with atoms. It's in the baking industry, it's in the fashion industry, it's in mechanical design, industrial design, the bio, medical field and there's new fields that join us every day. DIY stands for do it yourself. A maker is referred to a person who makes things and builds things and kind of enjoys the construction of making. And hacker spaces is another term that you might hear. Hacker spaces are just a place where people of all walks of life come together, usually doing some sort of arts and sciences combinations of those and it's kind of a mechanism for support within the community and for education to the broader community that it's part of. So the other thing I kind of want to touch on a little bit is this whole concept of open source as a broader concept and we've seen open source in the past as something that you probably all heard of, which are patents. And so patents, I want to remind people that when patents started, they started really as a way for open source to take place. So when you get a patent, you have to open source the designs, you have to tell people what you're doing and how you did it. And then that happens to be under exclusive rights for the next 20 years and that's where open source hardware differs a little bit. And I think that this is my belief that open source hardware is the 21st century patent. I think that it's not only open sourcing innovation but it's also democratizing innovation. So instead of having that 20 years of exclusive rights, instead you get an entire community of innovators to work with you and to collaborate with you and to contribute to your hardware. So it's kind of the two heads are better than one argument. It also is about producing products that are continually growing instead of kind of having a product that's locked in a stalemate for the next 20 years. So I wanted you to kind of think about that as a parallel, as a compare and contrast as we move through the panel. And next up I want to introduce my, or you guys can introduce yourselves on the panel. I'm David Mellis. I'm a Ph.D. student at MIT Media Lab. Also the co-founder and lead software developer for an open source hardware project called Arduino, which is a micro controller development platform that a lot of people use to build kind of interactive art, interactive objects of all kinds. I'm the co-chair of this years of my hardware summit and a member of Oshawa. One of our first projects at Oshawa was a survey of the open hardware community. Even though we make it on our own basis and we get together often in events like the open hardware summit, we still felt that we didn't have a good understanding of who we are as a community as well as how and why we make open source hardware. So the survey closed only three days ago. We don't have an in-depth analysis of the data yet. But there are a few interesting things that I would like to mention briefly. The first one was the surprising number of respondents. We, given how difficult it is to get people to take surveys, we initially expected around 200 responses over a period of one month. We got over 2,000 over two weeks, which is really surprising. And it tells us that one, this seems to be a very proactive and vocal community that wants to be heard and wants to participate. And it's probably also much larger than we initially imagined. Another interesting aspect is the makeup of the community in terms of fields of practice. As we expected, over 50% identified as programmers and engineers, but about one-third also identified as educators, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs, meaning that open hardware is not just something that engineers care about, it's something that has an important role in education and business as well. And finally, I'd like to mention that over one-third of the respondents stated that developing, designing, developing and selling hardware, open source hardware is a source of information. So the next panel will talk more about the business side of this, but I just wanted to mention that while you're going to hear us talk a lot about knowledge sharing, it's important to keep in mind it's an economically viable practice. Hi, I'm Ann Marie Thomas. I'm an assistant professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, not the Iowa. And there I'm an engineering professor teaching undergraduate design, but I also run our Center for Pre-Collegiate Engineering Education. So a lot of my teaching is actually teaching in K-12 teachings. And so I spend a lot of time looking at the role of engineering and making for youth in a formal and informal setting. I've done a lot of interviews of what makers were like as kids, and we try to develop for that market as well. So one project my students has actually turned into a small company, for example, is using Play-Doh to construct circuits. And so that's sort of our introduction for my lab into creating something that then someone does sell, even though we publish all the recipes and buy the parts online. So my first question to the panel is, what drives you to be part of the movement? Should we all? I guess there's a bunch of things for me. One is just it feels right to kind of share the things you do, right? If I'm designing something, you want to put it out there. You want people to be able to build on it. You want to get feedback on it. You want to let other people learn from it, take from it. Another thing I think from the perspective of Arduino, like part of being an open source hardware company is you develop this ecosystem around your product, right? So we make and we sell some number of hardware products, right? But because it's open source, other people can take it and they can make their own versions. They can make their own accessories. They can make the ones that really suit their needs. And as a result, you get this much kind of stronger community, this much bigger sort of movement. And it's all kind of based in some sense on the stuff that you're doing. So you get a lot more momentum and you get a lot more I think just impact and sort of it works much better because you do it as an open source product. So that's kind of like the personal and the project side. I mean it's pretty much what David said. The personal side for me is that I am not an engineer by training. So open source and the community around it is what lowered the barriers enough for me to 10 years ago coming from social sciences, start working with electronics and smart materials and basically developing hardware which had never occurred to me that I could do without having to go to school for it again. So there's very much that side that it basically allows anyone who wants to do, like he gives anyone who wants to do it the moment to, it doesn't matter what you do for a reason but it's very, it just makes me feel bad as a person, as a creative person. Many reasons for sort of a personal reason as a parent and as a teacher, how you learn about the world is by seeing how things work. And if you're going to be a writer, you read the writings of lots of other people. If you're going to be an engineer, I hope you've taken apart some things in your life and seen how they work. So this is a community that really encourages that sharing together, that learning together and really giving an option, particularly if you look at the products being designed for kids, that you get kids being very active, Katerina's findings, that kids are actually becoming active in this world and being able to give them the plans as opposed to just a black box to me as a really powerful invitation for them to learn more. So David, in answering your question you kind of talked about the people who contribute to the Arduino project and things like that. Can you kind of walk us through like the steps of somebody creating a derivative off of your product? Yeah, so we, I mean we publish all the source code file, the software we make, all the design files for all the hardware we make. And it's very easy, it's actually, you know, it's not a very complicated circuit board, it's very easy for someone to take those files to download it and then change it in some way that makes sense to them, right? So like some people want something smaller, they want something bigger, they want to use a different processor, they want to add things to control motors, or they want to add things to control lots of lights, or you know whatever like their specific project did, their specific thing that they want to be able to do with it. They can go, they can take the thing because again, you know, we only make maybe a few things and they're the things that are sort of the most general, right? So it's very easy for someone to take the thing that they really want to do and make their own board. It's actually like, you know, it's super easy, and probably a lot of you guys know, it's like really easy to actually order circuit boards and order all the parts. It's surprisingly, you know, you just go online, you click a buy button, you don't have to like talk to anyone or deal with anything, it's really complicated. Well, okay, not to talk to someone, it's not like you have to negotiate a contract or like get a special quote or anything, you just order these things. Yeah, so I think that's sort of the process of people who just take it. Oftentimes, I think people's first circuit board that they design will be taking an Arduino board and making their own version of it. And a lot of times, yeah, it is specific to like their project or their thing that they want to do. And so again, as a result, we get sort of like all these versions for like anything you want to do, you can find like the Arduino board that is like perfect for that thing. So something that I've heard, I think all of you say, either in your introduction or the last question, you talked about sharing. So let's kind of dig a little bit deeper into that. Why do you share your design? What are the benefits of sharing? Well, I mean, we do have a few, actually we have some data from the survey about that. Why do people share their part as open source? And so one of the main reasons is to obtain feedback from the community. So basically, your products or your designs don't exist in this empty space. So this allows you to immediately get feedback on whatever it is, be it commercial product or being just an artistic project and you can improve it. Because this is a very proactive community, the people who buy your hardware or who like take your designs will not only give you their opinion immediately, they will redesign it for you and sometimes even prototype it for you. It's like, oh, this is what your board should look like here. So you get like all this amazing R&D that is not just we R&D in some cases, but it's also like they like to feedback from the customers. So it's like one major challenge that I think people like to share with us. So for our project, if we look at the squishy circuit, in some ways I love the extended definition of open hardware because we've always wanted something made out of Play-Doh is actually hard. When we post things, we post actually a recipe, flour, lemon, cream of tartar, a couple other ingredients I'll mention why this was helpful. So we've actually published the baking side of things, we've published some of the code we use with Arduinos to make different toys that you can play with downstairs. We also published the circuit information. Our goal really was we thought this was fun, my kids liked it, my research students thought it was fun, couldn't we use this in classrooms and to get teachers to use it cheaply. The goal was to make it cheap and so we put everything out there and really we never intended to sell anything and I don't want my students to sell to the kids mainly because teachers found that they really wanted to do it. They could make the dough themselves but they didn't want to have to go by each individual part and it'd be nice if someone sold the kid. We still sell individually how you can buy every part but then we show you could buy this kid. But the fun thing for us education-wise is we post this and we've gotten, as Heterina mentioned, lots of feedback. When we designed it we didn't really think through how many kids are allergic to gluten but boy, within two days I had many parents telling me he's saying this is great but what do we do about our kid? So we have the gluten-free recipe. It turns out that it's really hard to buy almost impossible to buy cream of tartar in many countries, rural Japan and France. So we now have the lemon recipe that we wouldn't have thought of. So it's actually helped us spread our reach. We had alum in one recipe and I'm from Minnesota. We make a lot of pickles and use alum for pickles. So it's easy. All of our grocery stores sell alum. Apparently no one else's grocery store sells alum. So that was our deal breaker right away whereas if we had just made... we learned so much more from an educational stem by putting it out there and getting feedback. It was a project designed by undergrad. So the chance for them to get feedback from people really using it for us was priceless. Can you talk a little bit more about sharing in general within the educational system and how that works and what parallels sharing and education has with open source framework? Sure. It's sort of a growing thing right now that is the role of sharing and education. The Internet's been a great thing. Teachers can post some of their curricula and modify it themselves. I mean for us one thing is we didn't... we post one tiny little curricula for squishy circuits. It's a starter point. But we've had teachers that have shared. So can you please post my curriculum? These standards in Alaska. And you know I'm using this with the 9th grade chemistry class. We had one teacher who wrote to us from I think Washington who he combined it with the home economics class anymore but it was a life skills course. And so they were learning to cook. They're cooking the recipe. You have the intro computer program in class that's designing it and then they put all the students together to actually build the circuits. We wouldn't have jumped at these collaborations. You know the third grade art teacher writing us. But by being able to post those, you know we have the webpage, the recipes. We also have a Facebook group that teachers are posting what they do. We couldn't have been that creative. We're not the teachers in the classroom day to day. So it's been fun to see how people will pull little parts of what someone else is doing, add to that and throw it back out there. And I think that's a model that works for a lot of the projects out here. As teachers are trying to incorporate more and more hands-on learning, you can learn a lot by seeing what someone else has already done, particularly those things at the computer. And I'm sure Leah can even talk to this again seeing how things grow, which she speaks later, how things grow in a classroom. I think by throwing things out there and saying let's work together, our goal for this project was purely educational. In fact, we thought we'd say we won't sell anything but this out here. There was a community that actually told us, well actually could you please sell some of the parts because it's lovely that you told us that six places would be divided into individual motors, but could you package them? So it's sort of been neat to see what we're told is wanted, but then also to let the teachers learn from each other. Teachers are the experts in education and informal mentors, not the people who are handing some of the pieces to them. So to let them connect directly and work together as opposed to always through us has been pretty rewarding. So how much do you guys are all kind of involved with various open field projects? How much of what you make is driven by the community and community involvement? That's a tricky question I think. I don't know. I mean from my perspective I guess part of it is making things that you think people will find useful and that is not always I think directly driven by what people say. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's just like it's clear you can see there's these new capabilities out there that we want to expose to people that we want to make easy. Because part of I think part of what you're doing is just showing people what's possible. And then some of it you certainly get tons of feedback about what works and what doesn't and so to that extent I think it's really helpful. And also I guess understanding what people are actually trying to accomplish. For Arduino as a platform for people to make other projects on top of it. So it's really, it's driven a lot by what do people care about? What are people really trying to do? Because there's always kind of more to do or more to fix that you can never get done and so it's really trying to understand what should these things matter? What should these things people need to actually get their projects done and get their work done? I think that drives it a lot. Trying to make the priorities match up with what people are actually trying to do and not necessarily like some more abstract set of criteria. Would you say some of the business side of things? Well it's business and it's also it's also kind of software which is not necessarily tied directly to any product. But when you say hey we want to make this library and products as well it's like which yeah it's sort of which products are people going to find the most useful and which kind of documentation or software are people going to find the most useful as well? I think it was Lee Moore who once said or someone said very rightly that people should make things that they use themselves because it's really really hard to guess what others want. So I avoid trying to think what would be useful but sometimes we all do that which is useful for others. So I guess I work or develop two types of things. One is our teaching materials so I teach often our artists and makers how to use small materials. So a lot of what I do is like I teach how to make a prototype out of that that is not it doesn't have to be finished product in itself but it shows how it works and what it could be used for. So yes it is community driven in that case because it's the direct result of communication with students and people who ask questions about things and I try to figure out how to make that thing clear to them. And then the other one is the personal side which is what drives a lot of makers or most of us which is like curiosity and sometimes just the idea of a challenge you wake up in the middle and think because you want to see if it's possible and why isn't it possible and how can I make it. So but in a way I find that the projects that are only interesting to me I mean they will consume me for two or three nights but I will eventually go like okay now I know enough I don't need to worry about this anymore but if it's something that other people also want to know that output nor working to it and I'll document that and I'll really look at the process and all that so community driven I mean I can directly solve community I think in the education world there's a little bit of a question there are certain things that have to be taught and if there are new ways to teach them I mean that every fifth grade has to talk about electricity and circuits so it was a natural fit for us I was thinking a little bit about the earlier question and I think another building from the education standpoint one is the deep black boxing of a lot of things there's some students who really want to know what's inside things it's not always so easy to get inside particularly as teachers start to integrate a lot of this into their classrooms the making the open source this isn't something that's usually taught in most education schools right now it's changing a bit but if you look at most teachers this really never came up so if you're going to teach something brand new where do you get where do you get the support and the open hard work community really has tried to reach out and has done some great work in being that supportive something's not working you get a lot of replies overnight we've had teachers answering each other's questions on Facebook about projects I just want to help particularly education so that's an advantage that it's sort of the fastest customer support in some ways opted for some of these projects not always but it has its place you know maybe not every project does that fit for but in a lot of cases particularly but for new to the teachers having the community people sharing what worked and also what didn't work and I think that's something that's shared a lot very often that maybe we don't usually see in all communities is what didn't work if you're going to do something with 38 year olds it's really nice to know what didn't work 38 year olds who did it the week before just to build on a little bit I mean I think one of the things that's really nice is I mean the community can drive what you do but also you don't necessarily even have to do that because the community can just drive themselves right and they can do what they want to do and then you can maybe Google or you know sometimes there are things happening that you've never heard about you know if you don't Google switchy circuits or we don't know that's happening in China and Ireland and Latvia I'm just going to make this by the idea of like support like community support like because this is an international community there's always someone up somewhere so excuse me if you post a question at 4am someone somewhere in the world is going to answer your questions it's really nice so so I said something earlier which is that I think the open source hardware is equivalent to the 21st century pattern and I'm wondering what your opinions are on that and being that you've all put something out there in open source hardware rather than patenting it what are have you gotten you know what are the benefits of innovation there and do you ever wish that you would have patented it? we don't have to go first it was never our goal we did a project that we wanted to have other people first we wanted to see if we could do it that was our goal we were really impressed with the insoluble circuits like Leah and paintable circuits can we sculpt them that'd be fun I like Lido can we do this and then it was this could be used by others it was never I'm a professor my students this was a fun research project we wanted to put it out there we never actually ever thought about making a product we had asked that quite a bit could this be a product well you know we're making it out of stuff in the kitchen you know this is not and one of my students that does sell it but again it's pretty easy to put together stuff so for us it's a great situation for me they're just like and Marie like the things that I made like they only exist because they're useful to others so it's just editing and just like being a contradiction so yeah you have a different situation so yeah well I mean with with how do we know it's interesting I mean I think one of the things that you can do is that you can coop your investment on the thing and one of the things that's been interesting I guess for we know is you know again this stuff is getting like easier and easier to make and so I feel like in some ways it just requires kind of less and less of that investment so like you said it's almost like you know that 20 year period it's like you really only need you know six months or a year or something to really recoup what you put into it and so you don't necessarily need this kind of intellectual property protection because you know at least for this stuff we're doing again like it's not like we had to like buy a factory and like you know set up all this infrastructure and so in that sense yeah I think that that idea of patent as you get the protection for a time but it's also in exchange you're sort of publishing this so other people can build on it and so you're really kind of encouraging commerce in general in the long run because it's not just you and your company you can build on the things you've developed but it's everyone else and I think we're just trying to speed that up because the technology is getting so much faster now that it doesn't make sense to wait that long before you can kind of build on each other's work I don't know if they're the name survey yeah so basically what we found out with the survey is that a large majority of open source hardware developers release designs with no license whatsoever like nothing some of the families into the public domain are just saying oh I made this this is what I do too like you know sometimes I'll license and create comments if I think of doing it but more often than not I'm just like oh here it is this is how you do it this is where you get what you do it's like how you wire it and it's like kindergarten sharing that we would talk a lot about that it's just because it's what we do and to this like raise a lot of feeling think about a position to answer but as far as our purposes go like getting the information out there it's just like it changes when it's about like a really large business side of it just and for the smaller projects particularly they're driven by younger makers it's an expensive and not clear process for a lot of students who have kind of started that route and it's not really attainable it's just that that's pretty daunting if you're 19 with an idea and trying to figure out how to pay for the patent and that process someone who's gone for it recently 10 20 I think I might even be low and I think the average time to issue is about six years which I mean is like we had some preliminary patents in our group we decided we'd rather just be working with people on these products and get them out there so Katerini you brought up did you have one? Oh no I think one patent we actually we got to one and decided it was hard particularly for younger and if you're not in a company if you're an individual it's my students so Katerini you mentioned about the people in the community don't have any license whatsoever and for those of you who aren't aware there's sort of around three kind of licenses open hardware world that are sort of waiting to be sort of matured I think but you know but everything has to start somewhat of course so I'm wondering if you know this is a complete grassroots bottom up movement so far what are your opinions on having a legal framework be part of this community do you think that a legal framework is going to be invited by the community or do you think that you know we need to do we're doing a completely different framework altogether the source of hardware software has been around for a long time what do we have I mean officially open hardware has been around for a very long time but not under this specific name and as far as I know there's not being a single court case like with a license or something at least like nothing we have heard about is like famous so I mean we do this is my first we do spend a lot of time talking about licenses and I think it's important to understand the consequences of how things work and how to protect your work and your business but just in general nothing really bad has happened to anyone that I know of and if it does happen even if you have a really good license people can't always afford to defend it the cost is almost as much or maybe more than filing a patent because it's not just not having a patent I would say like if someone infringes on it you have to be able to afford to defend it and that costs more than a patent itself so I'm told so this is a bit of a tough question I guess like in one hand we do need a legal framework because we want to be clear about how this works how we protect ourselves and our work and our community but on the other hand I don't know we're doing so far seems to be working for some reason yeah I mean it's not clear I mean I guess with hardware it's not entirely clear how a lot of these legal issues apply and certainly patents apply but you know there's a lot of questions about copyright and whether or not designs are copyrighted and would that prevent someone else from making something from your design anyway and again I think in general like a lot of open source hardware companies aren't necessarily relying on kind of intellectual property protection to kind of ensure a viable business so in that sense like the specific legal protection is not so much the issue right you're you're making products you're selling them you're making things you know good products and selling them at a reasonable price and people want to pay it and so whether or not you have a legal framework that sort of stops someone else from taking your product out of it is not necessarily kind of what you're counting on anyway in sort of like a business sense I mean I do think it's important I guess to be clear when you do open source something like what you're allowing other people to do with it and even if it's just intention again I guess whether or not really the law applies but to say hey look this is not just for you to study but it's really for you to take and make other products from and to use in lots of different ways without kind of asking me again I think that's really important because then we can all sort of build on each other's work without having to go through these like kind of slow processes or like contract negotiations or things like this but yeah I don't know if there's any I mean it's not clear what the needs are kind of a more specific legal framework is I guess I don't think I need much to add on that so do you guys think that open source hardware is the way of the future? Why? I think there's a lot in favor of it so like I said I mean I think hardware is getting easier and easier to make and there's more and more technologies where you can you can just take a file and you can send it to a laser cutter you can send it to a 3D printer you can send it to a circuit board manufacturer and they'll they'll give you an object back and so it's like more and more it makes more and more sense to like share those files because people can actually can do something with them and they can get things made and again they don't have to make molds they don't have to build a factory they don't you know and so I think the more that kind of our things are coming straight from from software the more it makes sense to start to treat hardware in some of the ways we started to treat software in terms of open source so in that sense I think there's a lot kind of going for it and I also think you know again I mean I guess another big big force is just the internet right and as we've seen with the internet makes it easier to collaborate on software it also is starting to make it easier and easier to collaborate on hardware I think as the kind of design tools get better and support more collaboration it will become easier and easier to collaborate on hardware and it will make again it will make more and more sense to put your files online and let other people kind of work together with you on them so I think there's a lot of kind of technological trends that are really pushing for it I'm from an education standpoint I mean the ability for children and older children and adults are trying to teach themselves something it's a huge resource to be able to work together and see the inner workings of how something goes together and how they can modify it you know as I said if you're a writer you read other people's things we had been going through a phase where it was much harder to start taking part things and see what's inside something and how are you going to build the next car if you've never seen the inside of yours because you're now in a place where you can order a circuit board or an Arduino or a a soldable circuit and even if your parents and your teacher don't know how to do it there's this community that will help you and if it's not working you can see what's not working so for me from an educational standpoint it's incredibly exciting it really is opening up a whole new world of exploration for people who want to learn more I mean of course what David and really said it's I think it's innovation and how fast it does it how it allows allows a barrier in that country that allows more people to join this group of potential innovators because they have the knowledge and they have the imagination it's forming the next generation of engineers because they actually know how things work and then on a more I don't know it's not actually on a more social and cultural level hardware literacy is really, really important there's a number of studies that show how technologies shape our behavior and the way we communicate the way we work the way we play and there was a time like when the Apple 2 and the first person computers appeared we controlled the machine at least we knew how the machine worked like if something broke you knew how to fix it if the screen wasn't the way like we could change it we could basically it was like it was never like this is a tour and this is me but there was this relationship where you could imprint your own personality on a technology and not the other way around pasting your computers and cell phones became like smaller and smaller like I can open this computer but like I would not understand what I see because it's so it's meaningful it's just so complex that basically I have to consume the way it was given to me we open so our hardware we have the chance to shape the technology we use instead of letting this technology shape us and this is like has profound implications of a great level and work and communication and human and so it's like it's a little bit more top level future yeah maybe one more thing that you remind me of I mean it's a bit I think to say open source hardware is not necessarily to say it's going to replace kind of existing proprietary hardware but it creates all these new spaces for people to make things that wouldn't have existed otherwise because they don't make sense for a big company to make or because just no one thought of it and so it's sort of opening up this new space for lots of new people to make new kinds of things and yeah a lot of it small entrepreneurs that we wouldn't have seen right right but it creates a lot of new spaces so so this panel was on what is open hardware and so coming from inside the movement I was finding that I had to remember that not everybody innately knows at this point what open source hardware is so I do want to open it to all of you and if you have any questions on what is open source hardware or questions for people go ahead if you have a question or anything about if you could stand up and you ask your question sure so Mary it seems like your product is widely used in schools have you seen any issues with teachers being unable to work it or any sort of training issues around that that have come back to you or has it all just picked up and run? we answer a lot of email I have under every research student part of their job is to answer email we have pretty much it is once you choose and we get some press then we get ten emails something must happen this week if we get a lot of email about programming we know how to do our squishy sound demo so maybe someone posted it somewhere so yeah we have seen a lot of that we post a lot of YouTube videos and other people have taken their own spin on it for a while and I think one of the most watched videos in our project is done by a ten year only California super awesome Sylvia we've seen people producing information for it in other countries and we're happy to do that so they're probably going to get some of the questions but yeah we still get a lot of questions and we're happy to answer them I think also I've heard Mitch Altman talk about his TVB gun saying there's one button on the thing I didn't think that I needed a support come up to our service and you know you kind of always do it for yourself sometimes yeah so I was interested to hear you say that most of the open source hardware is the designs are published without any license at all and it just scared me a little because I wonder would it be possible even theoretically for somebody to take those designs and put an intellectual property claim on them even though they weren't the inventor or designer and is that a consideration so I mean none of us is a legal expert but what we are told is that by publishing your designs online publishing prior art so after that no one can patent it I believe this is a legal question right yes that's in the case of patents yes that's right but in copyright it's probably copyright is by default can you please stand up and speak up yeah copyright is by default so the design is copyrighted by the fact of publishing in case of patents yes you have a prior art right right so copyright you get automatically just by publishing something and a patent you no one else can patent something you already published like it doesn't matter how you do it I mean I I guess these kinds of things are always concerns but I don't think that it doesn't feel like you're making it worse by publishing your design you know what I mean because you're infringing their patent right anyway and they don't it seems like they don't really need your design file to do that right or like your information so I think the benefit of publishing the file kind of outweighs because that risk I think I don't I don't feel like it increases that risk very much at least it's just what continues for me is that you know the new license the new license will remain open right so if it you know I would worry about somebody putting some kind of IP claim on it in order to you know not only to make a profit about it but to stop other people using the design but if that hasn't happened yet and isn't a concern I think there's also a difference between I mean open source hardware is this wide wide wide range of projects and collections and things I mean you probably I mean you could license it like I will put licenses on my Arduino code just as an afterthought but it really depends like are you planning on building a business around it is it just something or things that have an educational purpose and it just doesn't things that probably don't have any commercial value for someone else other than yourself I think there's also something to be said about the licensing for the design files but you don't have to be completely transparent about your entire business and so you can still have the best place to source from in China versus all your other competitors or versus anybody else is going to attempt to just you know take the exact design and clone it basically and maybe put a patent on it but I think you know it's open source you can go and build it yourself but it's not you know a completely transparent business transaction where you know you don't expect that everybody's going to show us all their contacts and all their books and all their you know that's not the concept of open source so there are still some risks that I guess you know are protected that's alright ready to put it back there you have open source software and you become quite an expert at disclaiming liability how long does that continue to work in hardware great question yes it's a good question yeah I think it's tricky I mean part of I think what happens is that there is there is usually a manufacturer right so you're you're sharing the design and the design is not the thing that someone is going to use that is potentially going to create a liability it's at some point I think it's there's someone who has a business who's producing and selling the product based on that design and so open source doesn't necessarily get you you know it doesn't necessarily let you avoid those questions of liability right whether things open source are not sort of separate from you're making something you're selling it you have to make sure that it's safe and you know it's that there's protection for that I have two unrelated questions the first is for my PhD project I was trying to make a new device and I had to even then go into China to source most of the you know bare bones of equipment hardware I'm wondering is that one day for a screen and then it was the wrong plan and I had to wait another screen another time so I'm just wondering in this movement is there a suggestion or some type of effort to make to be able to source it here in the United States the second question is on the other side of the block we're here in the Rayburn building is there any type of policy implications for just being here today or being worked on from the other side of the block manufacturing I mean I think there's a lot there's a lot I mean there's a lot in America there's a lot of stuff happening in America I think also one of the nice things is it's a very international thing as well so you can you can