 This talk, I'm gonna talk about Open Hardware a bit, and this might be preaching to the choir, but I just give an overview of stuff. I'm one of the people who made Open Hardware projects kind of at the beginning before it was really a thing, and, but I think it's fantastic. It's really the way to go for pretty much any project that we might wanna do. But, like anything, I wanna talk about this, because it's very personal for me, and give some background. I talked about this in my little talk on opening days, so if you were there, sorry to repeat some of it, but I am a TV addict. And I say that because this is why what I do is meaningful for me. We're very much a product of our upbringing, and it's not like we're trapped by it, but it informs who we are in a big way. And inventing, I'm an inventor, and inventing is really about doing things that are meaningful, like we can invent things that are stupid, we do that all the time, but why would you put that out into the world? Let's put meaningful things out in the world, and the reason why what I do is meaningful to me is because of my background, which really sucked. I was horribly bullied as a kid, targeted for being an introverted geek. That wasn't a safe thing back in the 1960s when I was a little kid. It's still not so safe now, but it's not as bad. But being an introverted geek, being fat, I was fat as a little kid, being gay, liking, learning, somehow that's a bad thing for bullies, and not caring who wins at a game, but that was really terrible. So being beaten up in school pretty much every day, often as the gym teacher watched, who becomes gym teachers? I'm just, anyways, life sucked. Same people as the leader? Yeah, cops later maybe, or CEOs, vice presidents. Well, being gay is more deceiving. So my parents were clueless, they were depressed as well, and I was just horribly depressed, so I tried to escape into television, which of course doesn't work, but as long as I was watching TV, I could seem to forget about my horrible existence, and kids on TV, unlike me, were beautiful, and they had understanding parents and friends who loved them, and problems that resolved always at the end of the show, and it just made me more depressed comparing myself to all of that. And time went away, and I didn't do anything useful. I just ate junk food and got fatter, I got more depressed, only to be more of a target at school, only to want to escape more into TV when I got home, and that is called addiction, and TV was, and is my first addiction. I tried a bunch later, too, but none of them work. They take away much more than they give. So that was as a kid, and for the first pretty much half of my life, time went away, staring at the screen, and now, of course, we have lots of screens, but yeah. But eventually, by 1980, when I was 23 years old, I quit cold turkey. I got rid of all the TVs from my apartment. I had a lot of them because I was a geek. I'd bring them home and fix them, and there were people throwing away, and I'd bring them home and fix them. I got rid of all of them, and that was the beginning of a long, long process of learning to live a life I love, and I eventually did learn to live a life I really love, and it was a lot of work. And I learned to, I had time, I could do things that I actually enjoyed, things that I loved, I became really good at it. There's that sign downstairs about spending 10,000 hours at any skill to become a master. You spend 10,000 hours at something, you get good. I got good at doing geeky stuff, and I helped other companies with their electronic problems and did things like help create virtual reality when it didn't exist back in the 80s, and was recognition and computer games and computer storage stuff, whatever. So I was a consultant for about 15 years, but, and that all happened from getting rid of TV. That was a huge, huge step for me, getting rid of that horrible force from my life, but by 1993, TVs, I started noticing we're popping up everywhere in public places, everywhere, everywhere. This horrible force that I got rid of in my life was invading my consciousness again, marketing at me, filling my mind like TV does with stories that aren't there for my benefit or any of our benefit. It's just there to sell me shit I don't want or need, including political candidates. So I don't expose myself to that shit, but in 93, they were all over in public places, like who wants to watch Dr. Phil when you're trying to eat lunch with friends or Gilligan's Island's reruns or whatever that fucker in the White House. So anyways, that was 93, and then I had this great idea to, I couldn't get rid of the TVs, but I could invent a key chain that would turn off TVs in public places, and I knew exactly how to do it, and that was in 93, but like so much it takes time, a lot of time to actually implement a project. So time went by 10 years in fact, and pressure was building and friends would kept telling me, what are you gonna do this? When are you gonna do this? So there was all this pressure. Finally, I had to quit work because I didn't have enough time to do things I really, really, really wanted to do. So I quit work after saving up enough money to work on things, including TV Be Gone, and I worked on TV Be Gone, and it took a year and a half. I thought it would take like maybe a few weeks to three months. Things always take longer, but by 2004 I had TV Be Gone prototype working, and I was going all over San Francisco where I lived turning TVs off in public places and really, really loving it, and I made ones for all my friends who were helping me with it and encouraging me, and we were all going around, and all of my friends' friends were excited about it, and those people even told their friends, and they told their friends, and it seemed like there were so many people who wanted to turn TVs off in public places, and like knew. So I'm like, one of the things I learned while consulting with companies was how to manufacture things. So I thought this might be an opportunity I'll manufacture as many as I can afford, and maybe I can sell them, and I did some math, if I could sell 5,000 to 20,000 I could afford to make, then I would break even. And if I could sell any more, that would be profit, and even if it took five years or 10 years, whatever, I would make a profit and there would be all these people going around turning TVs off, and that would be really cool. And it turned out, though, that I was totally wrong. I didn't sell 5,000 TV beguns in 10 years, not five years, I sold all 20,000 in three weeks. And I've been making living from it ever since. It was an overnight hit, and I got invited to give all these TV appearance for inventing something in terms of TVs off. And I was in New York Times and People Magazine, I don't know if you know People Magazine, if you're not from the U.S., but it's like Hollywood Gossip Magazine, but I'm on People Magazine, it's crazy. And New York Times from the page of the technology section and Fox News, Fox invited me on, and I turned off all of their monitors live, all 40 million people watched. That was cool. So, yeah, anyways, 15 years later, I'm still making living from this project that I just made one for me. And because I'm an inventor, putting things out that are meaningful for me, and if you do that, you put something out that's meaningful to you, if it's meaningful to other people, those are exactly the kind of things that people will hate you to do. And that's capitalism at its best. Of course, there are other problems with capitalism, but that's another topic. So, inventing is sort of boiled down to three simple steps. You see a problem, in this case, like TVs all over in public places, and then you have an idea on how to solve it. You know, it's like a remote control to turn them all off. And then, of course, it's a long process, but you do what you need to do to implement it, and then the thing actually exists in the world as a product that you put out there. So, through the years, I'm inventor, I've invented things for companies as a consultant, and it just so happens that my brother introduced my brother. He's a patent attorney. And, you know, this is a Jewish mom's dream. My son, the engineer, and my son, the lawyer. And, of course, it's a perfect match because inventors patent things, right? That's what one does, and I never even thought about it really. It just seemed like the thing to do, and that's what all inventors do, and that's what I did. I invented, with the help of my brother, TV Beyond. And I've had a lot of patents. It's just what inventors do. And I really thought about it, and patents are supposed to be for the small inventor to encourage innovation and give the person who invented it a monopoly for a limited period of time so they can put their thing out in the world and profit from it. Unfortunately, even with your brother's patent attorney and you do all the work and under his guidance, or her guidance, it costs a lot of money. It's 30,000 minimum. You have to make it to be useful. It has to be in other countries as well, China and Europe, and translated in all these languages. It cost me $30,000, US dollars. But it was an overnight success, TV Beyond, and it says patent pending on the package. It got me invited to lots and lots of events. I'm an introvert geek, but somehow it turns out that I actually like public speaking. And I got invited to hacker conferences. And at my second hacker conference, which was in Germany by the Chaos Computer Club, their 23rd Chaos Communications Congress, I gave a talk about TV Beyond. They invited me, and there's like 1,200 people or something like that, and they loved it. They gave me a standing ovation. They was like, what do I do with that? And then there's Q and A, and someone asks, kind of angrily, what's this patent thing? Why does it say patent pending, or patent on your packaging? Why are you stifling innovation? What do you mean? A year and a half to do this. It was a year and a half of my life. Of course, I patent it. There's people out there who only care about money. What if they take it and they take this away from me? And then they put it out in the world instead of me. And maybe the patent thing on there prevented people from copying it when it became an overnight hit. And it got me thinking. None of those answers really made sense to me, even though I was saying them. And I went home, and within a few days, I came up with a real answer, which was to make it open source. Open hardware didn't really exist as a public concept back then. But I talked to a bunch of people. And of course, I knew about open source software, free open source. Sorry, hard mess. But yeah, I made it open source. And it's been open source ever since. And that's been a really important aspect of why Tbegon is successful. If I didn't do that, I would not be making a living from it anymore. The old paradigm is really only for huge corporations and not for individuals like us. The old paradigm is like, this is mine. You can't have it. If you come anywhere near it, I will sue your ass. Stay away. You don't get any help. This works really well for some small number of huge corporations. They make a lot of money doing this. But everyone else cannot take part in it. This new paradigm is like, look at this cool thing I did. Check it out. It's really cool. If you want to do it, I'll help you with it. Let's put this out and do it. I'm doing this to put it out into the world. And you're going to help fucking aid great. And this makes not like huge bucks like for huge corporations, but it makes people a living. It makes people enough money so they can make enough to do what they do by doing what they do. What do you need more than that? And it encourages much more innovation. People can take your idea, cruise with it. They share whatever back to you. It's great. By 2010, people got together to actually explicitly talk about open hardware. There was an open hardware summit. We came up with a definition of open hardware. And you release everything you need in order to recreate the project. And the only restrictions that are allowed to call it open hardware and use this logo is that you can require that people give you credit, attribution, legal term, and they must share a like. So if they use your thing, derive from it, whatever. Those parts that are derived or what they use for your thing has to be shared with the same license. And then people worked on with Creative Commons and other licenses to have licenses that apply to this. And this is the one that I use all the time. It's called CCBYSA by just like a book is by this author. This is a project by me that's attribution and essay to share a like. So anyone who uses any of my projects, as long as they give me credit and share whatever they do with the same license, it's totally cool. The people I mentioned earlier who took my project and reverse engineered it and used my name and they used my, and I had a student make them stop it. They used my open source. I mean, everything was online. They could have just done that. And I would have been gladly just let them have use of it, but no. Anyways, a way cool thing about open source, open hardware license is that it's absolutely free. It's not $30,000. If you have $30,000 to do whatever you want with, it's way better to do it open source rather than waste the money on a patent. Also, if it's open source, you get lots and lots and lots of help for free from some of the most creative engineers on the planet. So there were all these people who did lots of really interesting things and they shared it with so many people and they shared what they innovated with my ideas back to me. Do that with a proprietary project. This saw all these engineers who did all of this for me for free. Of course, there were a lot of people making TV Be Gone remote controls in all sorts of ways. I didn't get a penny from it because they were doing it on their own, but those people went out and were super enthusiastically sharing it with other people saying, look at this thing, it's a TV Be Gone. I made it like a picture and TV's out and it's like, wow, that's amazing. And then they hear about TV Be Gone and then a lot of those people buy my thing. And then some people made a TV commercial for TV Be Gone. A TV commercial if you have a proprietary project. Those were friends of mine and their family and used to be in a punk rock band. She did the music and yeah, 30 seconds. It actually played on Fox TV. So you know, and when you do open source, you're sharing other people like sharing. You get a lot of free will, a free good will, and proprietary projects, that just doesn't happen. But because of all of this, it made TV Be Gone super successful and made just a small company with a few friends. We all still make a living out of it for 15 years. And besides, as people copy it and put it out into the world, they're putting my thing out in the world, the thing I put out in the world is because I wanted out in the world to make people's lives better, to make the world a better place for more people. So like why don't I want people to copy it? Of course I want people to copy it based on proprietary projects. I want people turning TVs off. I want people to spend time, to use time of their life for things that are way more enjoyable. That's why I put it out there and the more people that make my thing, the better. And so for all these reasons, I'm, and who knows what is going to be successful. One thing though with IP law that I think is useful, even though so much of it is broken, is trademark. So TV Be Gone is a name I came up with back in 1993 and just came with the idea of TV Be Gone. And I trademarked it, that's super cheap, super easy. It takes a few minutes, there's a form on the internet, it costs $350 and then the name is yours to use and no one else can use it. They can use my thing, if they want to use my name, then I'll license it and I just do it really, I just want people to do it. So that's not a big deal. But this is part of what protected me in that lawsuit against the guy who reverse engineered my thing and used my name and that I got all those AP emails which I talked about earlier before the official talk. So yeah, trademarking is easy and very useful. I can't really think of any downsides for any project for open sourcing your hardware project except for possibly B2B projects, business to business. Because it really requires a community for it to work and some business to business projects, there might not be a community, just might be people that want to compete and not share in health. Wouldn't there be a line at which the hardware is too complex for the average, let's say, for a community build? So I take my favorite example, it's a cell phone. Will you get a community building versions of your open source cell phone? Yes. I don't think so. Yes, definitely, because it's happening. It's a custom design. Not if you've taken an off the shelf thing from Shenzhen, there are people who already do yes. If you custom build this for your one specific product, probably not. Probably. Except for people. It's actually happening. So cell phone again, but that might just be a, there are a lot of very, very, very complex open source projects and there's no real downside to... But what if you've invested half a million to a million dollars worth of R&D to build it? Then somebody, the competitor in Shenzhen takes that. They're using your R&D that they produce and they're producing at a lower cost than you and now you've lost a lot of sales and you won't recoup your R&D cost because now they're doing it the way. There's a difference. The device is really small and cheap. Your investment is very small. Therefore, you'll get it back very quickly. But if you're a niche product and then someone completes it, but big enough for someone to do that, there must be a line of which it's no longer viable, right? Yeah, that's perhaps debatable. It's worth exploring. But the thing for the open source thing to work with the, you having the trademark for a name is you put it out there as big as possible with your name so people know with your name and then more and more people want the original thing with the high quality. But if someone does go off and do it better and cheaper, then you have time to do something else that's possible. True, but then let's say the money you lost in the R&D. Yeah, well, I think it's really important to not spend $2 million on a project. I know, but some projects are complicated. That's just what it costs. If you want to get into that market. So for example, you talked about this later. So I want to talk about what happens if someone violates your patent or your open source license? So if you have a patent, the only recourse you have if someone infringes on your patent is to hire lawyers and go to court, which takes hundreds of thousands minimum of your money and months of your time. And as a small company, you can't do that. You just can't. That's not a viable option. Only corporations can do that and they do. That's how they make money is through this shit. If you have an open source license and someone violates your open source license, the only recourse you have is to hire lawyers, go to court, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers in the courts, and spend months of your time. That's also not an option. But it's free. Open source licenses are free. And it is possible because you put a lot of goodwill into the world that you can get a lawyer for free to help you. And this has happened. And there have been examples of this prevailing import. Actually, is that no longer the case in the US? You can go to that body that will block imports without going to court. You can just report it and it's going to be a lot cheaper. Yeah, there's some tricks to pull. There's some tricks to pull. Yeah, but that's only if it's, that's only stopping the import. So anyways, there's lots of things that are debatable. But I think it's really a fantastic thing to share. You'll get a lot of benefits from it. And you put your thing out in the world. And you help yourself, other people support you. And it's pretty much a win for everybody. So that's my rant into your time. Here again is my contact info. And I will teach in soldering all day today and tomorrow. If you want to come and learn to solder, I've got two kits available here. This one with the Niki lights, colored cans of colored lights. And then my music's in the Sizer kit. And it's really fun to solder. Anyone can do it. I've done it for people of all ages all over the world. What's the atmosphere like? Two and a half. A very, very geeky little world. And the oldest has been 83. So there's my contact info in the video again.