 Our next talk is the Open Hardware Happy Hour, which is done by a bunch of people, so I'll not introduce them, but I will introduce themself in just a few minutes. So the stage is yours, have fun. Thanks Karl. Thank you. Hey, hey everybody, good to see you all. So Daniel, you are the moderator, why don't you start? Sure. Yeah, happy that we're coming together here and we started, we thought about starting an event series basically, this was the starting point and we want to do it every month and we want to switch between like virtual events like right now, but also like physical events like the happy hardware, the hardware happy hour has been, but we have to see how it goes with corona and so on. And we thought it would be nice maybe if we start with a little intro round. I'm Daniel, I'm working for Open Knowledge Foundation with Max together and we are working on a prototype fund hardware that we want to present more in detail tomorrow at seven on the same stage, unfortunately in German, but maybe there will be translation as well. And I'm also working in a project called Open Next where we work with like small, medium sized enterprises and connect with them and build open hardware products basically. And the idea was that everyone might say their connection to open hardware and because we're like in different places right now, maybe you can also say where you are and then hand over to the next person and I nominate Helen. All right, let's get started. So my name is Helen Lee, some of you may know me from the internet and others of you may know me from the hacker scene in Berlin or London. Currently I just moved to Portland actually where I'm still doing hardware stuff. Along with Drew Fustini and Dave Darko, we actually started the first hardware happy hour in Berlin which was held in Exxine or one of the bars near Exxine. So I'm really, really happy to see some familiar faces. Again, I deeply miss Exxine. So what do I do with open source hardware? Well, everything that I do is shared in every way and open source hardware is part of that. To me, open hardware falls under a wider remit of an open society about sharing knowledge, about sharing resources, sharing technologies. I think it's part of a wider philosophical movement shift towards openness. As you can see, data and blah, blah, blah. So I do a lot of my own work in hardware, mostly kind of little musical instruments and things with experimental materials. But also my job job is I work for Cride Supply and they're an American company owned by Mauser Electronics. All we do is open source hardware crowdfunding. That's it. We've like hosted Bunny, Huang, all of Bunny and Zobz's projects. We've done all sorts of different exciting things that Pina and Laura from Timon, German nager as well, lots of other things. So yeah, that's what I do. I both make open source hardware and I also help other people make open source hardware with Cride Supply. So there we go. That's me. Who's next? Should I have nominated somebody? Maximilian, go on. Yeah, thank you. I'm happy to be here. And Daniel already said something about me, I think. Yeah, as Daniel said, we're together at the Neutch Foundation setting up a prototype fund for open hardware because we think that that's something that needs to be pushed and need to get more attention. And yeah, my background is also kind of philosophical. I studied some years ago, philosophy of technology and engineering and some kind of stuff. And I'm very into open workshops. So yeah, Hacker Space is like as a scene. I'm a board member of the Verbund of Neuerwerkstätten. This is a German network of open workshops. And so yeah, this is my connection to all this. And I think, yeah, of course, open hardware is a very important movement if it comes to a society in which we take care of our things and yeah, and save resources and all these kind of stuff, which is important at the moment, transparency and so on. So yeah, I'm very into this topic. And I'm happy to discuss all of this with you. And I don't know if Mitch is there. I don't know. I cannot see him. I think he's on the left of the big screen with everyone. Mitch? Yeah, so, okay. Yeah, so hey everybody, my name is Mitch. And I'm sitting here at Exheim in Berlin, live while all of this RC3 stuff is happening, while everyone else is in various places in the world. And like everyone else, I've been working with open hardware for a long time. What made me kind of open or internet famous is an invention of mine, which is a key chain that turns televisions off in public places called TVBGON. Yeah, and it's like everything I do open. And even though it's open, a lot of people think, well, it's open. How do you make money? Well, the thing is the only reason why I've been able to make a living off of this for the last 18 years, which I have, along with 12 friends of mine who have also made a living off of this for the last 18 years, is because it's open. And there are a lot of reasons for that. But the biggest thing is when it's open, there are a lot of people who are helping and not just me and my little brain. My little brain works well some of the time. But when we have a lot of people looking at something, we have a lot of brains that are working a lot of the time. And together we have something much more powerful than each of us can do alone. And if we're going to have, and yeah, and those people are constantly telling other people about this project, which is PR that I would never, ever, ever be able to afford as someone with a small company. So yeah, and if we're going to have any kind of chance for survival as a species, I think part of it is going to be because we have open projects that exist because people find it meaningful. And when people find it meaningful, it's going to be used for things that are worthwhile rather than just maximizing profit for corporations, which is responsible for so much of this downward spiral where we find ourselves into environmentally and economically and data protection wise and all these other reasons. So yeah, maybe we'll be talking about some of this later tonight. So yeah, Cedric, you're the next person. Thank you, Mitch. Difficult to go after you. I'm just a red dumb embedded system engineer going back to school for a PhD, trying to get out of this industry pressure of money with hopefully some options using academia. I'm experimenting. Let's see where it goes. And yeah, basically, my background is in music. I kind of ended up diving in this hardware world because I was fixing my computers. I wanted to understand how to fucking make my own machines work and I ended up studying this and 10 years of engineering now. And yeah, I ended up collaborating with artists, making some sorts of interactive systems with, I don't know, wearables for dense that would control visualizations and solidifications and textiles. And that brought me to, I don't know, reverse engineering chemical processes to make my own sensors and help people make their own. And I think the question, why do we want to open up everything we do? I think we all have a personal life story. I'm guessing at this mine is that I grew up in these kind of hippie communities where everything was shared. It was just not even a question. And growing up in this industry hardware world, to me it was obvious that the hackerspace approach was the most appropriate, sharing ideas and technology so that we all grow together. That was my motivation. Maybe I'll share more about that later. Maybe you want to take the mic back. Yeah, but I also feel like, unfortunately we're missing three people, I think, that wanted to be on the stage. Drew wasn't able to make it, unfortunately. But I think we can also, I'm just thinking maybe it also makes sense to ask questions to each other simply because I think we all have a lot to share but maybe we can, yeah. If anybody did have any questions around the work that Drew is doing in risk five, I'm not an expert but I am married to him so we do have conversations about this a lot so I know kind of what's going on in the world of open processes and open silicon so I can talk about open silicon a bit. Maybe do that right now because I think it's super interesting. It's so cool. And actually there's a really good opportunity to get involved right now as well. So for those of you that don't know, there's a guy called Tim Ansel who does a lot of work in this space and I really recommend you check out some of his talks. He's a congressperson as well so he's done some really interesting talks on open silicon at congress. The last time we were in meat space he gave a talk about this exact subject but it's now several years down the line and this project has evolved so let me take a couple of steps back here. So when we think about open hardware we often think about the physical, you know like the PCB right? So like the finished, the end product, like how you make a TV begone for example or a synthesizer, another, in our due touch another Mitch example so those are the end product but really what we're looking at with open source silicon is looking more like the processes and we're looking at like how to get open all the way down so there's one thing to really show board design files but then how does that board get made and how do we pass on the knowledge about making these boards, right? And then furthermore when you go further down, down, down, down, down, you start going well how is the transistor made? Like how do we even make a chip you guys? Like how do we know? And as it turns out that knowledge is extremely proprietary so like making like it's not just like the design files, right? It's the physical processes here are not transparent at all. They're completely proprietary and that knowledge is sequestered away in like a few small and a few massive foundries, right? So obviously, I mean, hello we're having a chip shortage, you know having like all of the production centered on these individual things it's not just like a philosophical question it becomes a logistical problem here it's like how do we even make these things that we can't get hold of anymore? So Google and like eFabulous, which is a kind of like a location this is like all second-hand knowledge as well so like I'm not but like Mohammed from eFabulous has been really going on about this and like the sky water people at Google they've been working together to create an open source series of instructions, right? And they go all the way down so you can make fully open source silicon so that there's a replicable process for this creation of silicon there is a way to onboard people so that's this process that's been going on right, been going on in background but where it is right now is a really exciting stage in that they are actually opening up what they call these flights they call them like flights like when you go and make a chip there's a bunch of them happening right now that anybody can get chips made for free anyone, I'm not just not academics like not chip experts anyone, I'm talking like hobbyists are getting like chips made for themselves for free the only stipulation for this is that it has to be open source right and I'm guessing if you're interested in this talk then that's probably not a problem for you and even if you don't know anything about creating chips there's a really awesome course that's being run by Matt Venn at the moment called Zero to ASIC which is all about getting hobbyists involved and creating their own chips so if there's a conversation to be had around open silicon that needs to be happening now because there's so many exciting things happening in that space so if anybody's interested in creating a chip go right there right now go Google Tim Ansel or you know Duck Duck Go Tim Ansel which I use Duck Duck Go to be fair and look at what he's up to I mean he's not the only person involved obviously there's many many many many people in there it's just that he happens to have a lot of the best talks about it so go and look at that go on to the shuttle like right now you can go and make your own silicon for free and make it open source and be part of this whole open down to the transition level movement so that's that's to my best knowledge again this is just me reading articles and being interested in this I've not made a chip I've just listened to a lot of talks around it so that was my summation of what's happening in open silicon so apologies if I got some of that wrong but I hope you can use some inspiration I think these open silicon movements or like projects they are very important and they are maybe also like kind of connected to the way of how open source works in the software context I think this is something which is is true for electronics in general because you can use some of the functions how software works in this kind of context but what I think is still a problem if it comes to open hardware and this is a question which I would raise in this circle here when do you think is open hardware like a real must-have or something like this because this is something that we are asking ourselves at the moment if it comes to this funding processes which I think open source hardware is nothing which is like something which makes sense in itself technology is always connected to a specific aim is also something which is connected to open source and yeah which kind of at which point open source hardware is very a must-have in your point of view this is my question can I be a little on the joke side and say when is it not is there any reason to not open source anything that's the way I try to think and because anyway if people really want to see what's inside your hardware they will find out there's just no valid reason to close source anything that's my opinion we figure it out anyway so when if we want to answer that serious question I would say maybe the security field is where it's the most needed but I think for educational purposes everything should be open sorry Daniel that's great that's an interesting point I would say that I'm on the other side of the scale a little bit at heart I'm a pragmatist and I understand that we don't live in Star Trek the next generation as much as I wish that that was true we do still exist in a society we do have to pay our bills for example we open hardware but we don't make everybody do the standard open hardware we're just trying to meet people where they are and get them one step further if they're open to sharing their schematics open your firmware as well if they're opening their schematics why aren't you releasing your board layers because you know they're already on that journey so you've just got to be little by little come on give the people what they want but I think you do have to be pragmatic you can't yell at people for not being on the same page as you I just don't think that's positive I do agree with you I'm a rank hippie myself I'm also a pragmatist I'm just trying to push it the other way by thinking about it the other way but I still think that it doesn't really help a lot to close or anything so why not just embrace that I think we are and maybe we have all the same idea if it comes to this ideal but if it comes to the real world and you want to push for open hardware and you want to get politicians and so on and then you have you need to have a strategy and you need to have good arguments how this open hardware thing can work in this very capitalistic society and wherever for a lot of things are not these business concepts to have this kind of stuff open hardware so I think that's a very complicated question and of course it's always connected to a specific thing maybe and you ask me if there is something which should not be open I don't know maybe there's something very I don't know I think Helen you are also more on this side if it comes to art I think it's nice that some things are just special handmade and now the thing that they are but this is a little bit too I don't want to talk about this in a philosophical way maybe in a pragmatic way so I've been nervous I've had a question that I wanted to talk about can I send a question out there for the people I'm really concerned about how people in open technologies hardware I'm really concerned about how we treat them and how we help them earn a living I see so many people in open source burning out and people who are you know if they were an industry they could be earning a lot more money or this like that's a question a problem that really bothers me at night it's like how do we help people who are working in this way make a good living is it by helping create products is it by like getting some kind of Patreon thing how do we support the people and all of those things like the Patreon all those things are predicated on you being good at marketing do you know what I mean it's really difficult how do we help people who are making open source not pay the rent you know inspiring example I can give an inspiring example of some people who are doing things like how are people keeping their lights on is this a hobby do you just have to work for Red Hat or Reno or something how do people make a living in open source hardware how do we support that so I'll be interested to hear your thoughts I'm hoping that Mitch would probably have good answers I can address that from my perspective I was super lucky enough to come up with a project that caught the ear of the media the media loves examining its own navel and I created something that turns TVs off in public places and media loved it and they spread it all over the world within the first 2-3 days of my project being available to the world on my website and it changed my life forever for the better and I've been making a living from it ever since not everyone's going to be that lucky to come up with a project that markets itself like you said Helen it's really important to be able to spread the word about your project and not to make a living as a good example as an artist so to make a living as an artist you not only have to be able to do art that's meaningful for you like something's burning inside of you and it needs to come out into the world you have to have skills for being able to do that and similar with an electronics project or a software project we're any kind of project we have to have the skills from taking something that's meaningful for us burning inside of us and putting it out into the world because we really need to do that the only other choice is to fight ourselves and if we fight ourselves as I like to say you know who loses but that doesn't mean you have the skills for putting your project out into the world how do you put the project out into the world that's a whole another skill set and if you do put it out in the world now you've got to be able to deal with bookkeeping and paying taxes and running a small business maybe you need help and you need to have employees and you need to be able to know who to hire and who not to hire and who to fire if it comes down to that running a business is another whole set of skills and being able to juggle all of these things learning them as you're doing everything it's not easy and it's rather stressful but it's something that's burning inside of you that needs to come out so it's worth doing but there's no easy answer for all of this but I think one of the keys is to be part of a community where there are people supporting each other first of all into making time and making it fun to make time to explore what it is that might be meaningful to each and every one of us because we don't necessarily know we're not trained for that after going through school for 16, 18 whatever years each of us has gone through school as some people have famously said the school system beats the creativity out of us so we need to have a space to explore what's meaningful for us and when we're doing that in a community that's supporting us to do that we can do that easier and better than if we're doing it on our own which harkens back to open hardware, open source again because again it's a whole bunch of people more eyeballs, more brains more psyches, more people looking at something and improving it as a result we can do something much better in community than on our own in general and when there's a community of people involved who many of whom also see meaning in the project that you're doing many people might want to help and some people might be good at creating a logo and they can give you an idea of a way to put your project on another level that you might not have thought of on your own there might be someone who can either help with bookkeeping or recommend a bookkeeper there might be who loves what they do and helps people doing that there might be people who are good at running small businesses who can give you ideas and you know I learned all this stuff on my own as as TVB gone suddenly became an over literally overnight hit I had to learn all this stuff and I was fortunate that I could do that but I was also very fortunate that I had a whole bunch of friends who are really good at doing all these things who had time when I needed their help there's a lot of luck and circumstance involved as well like with all of with all of life so yeah so there's no magic easy that's good one size fits all but in that kind of abstract answer there's perhaps keys for every one of us in all of our projects because it's connected to the question of Helen and maybe to a question in the internet I would just say that there are maybe also examples I don't know how they like if they have like a good life or not this stressful life what you said I think Lucas from Berlin who made this open hardware notebook here Crates at Y yeah somebody asked if we could name somebody who made something open hardware like and this is the one MNT reform MNT in Berlin and I think he had a very stressful life creating this notebook because he made all these things on his own with a small team and he had a small production line in his office and yeah but he made this possible with this kind of internet funding way there are other examples like this but yeah but then we come to this problem of open watching I don't know to name them because then we have a new topic interesting topic I can add some really good because I also saw that question some good examples of people doing so there's great Scott gadgets in the US are doing really great work and they do really cool like really cool open source tools I'd also check out the work of Peter Esden who is behind a bunch of different open source tools well actually Peter Esden has got a really interesting individual business model he does electronic streaming on Twitch as well as well as doing his proper hardware stuff so that's really interesting so Peter Esden, great Scott gadgets Lucas Timon Skou is another really interesting he's like a hardware designer with a product design background as well similarly to well I don't know like Lucas has got a product design background as well but like Timon did the Pewunara which is a CM4 carrier board with an Arduino form factor really cute little board there's a lot of people doing interesting things who else is good of course Adafruit and release their designs as well yeah spark fun seed studio in China yeah yeah exactly seed studio yeah EMS I don't know if EMS I'll do a lot of open hardware but not all of them are open I believe but anyway yeah they do some stuff in that space why is there so much SDR stuff happening in there's so much SDR stuff happening right now it's been bonkers loads of at the moment actually one of the best things about my job at Cry2Ply is I get to see like all of the submissions that are coming in from like all over the world like I get to see like we actually turned down like 90 to 95% of everybody who applies to Cry2Ply which is a fact not a lot of people know but we get to see what everybody's working on everywhere and it's really fun to see all the trends in open hardware like people have really gone for SDR they're going like bonkers for SDR at the moment which is really really fun to see lots of risk 5 stuff in the Pip pipeline as well which is really cool to see as well particularly with this new all-winner G1 chip which is quite exciting go I was wondering why do people get turned down is it because you try to help them not to waste their time on something that's not realistic and they would just die we're very strict so we would not take any product that hasn't got a finished prototype so our worst nightmare would be vaporware so we require fully functional prototype which like a lot of people like oh yeah we can do this show worse worse like cool so it's amazing and that's how we and then we also get like a bunch of people who are like quite fun to my sewing factory and we're like no we do electronics like so yeah it's a big project that is open source that maybe we should not talk about that the Tesla cars are open source only partly only partly the battery the battery charging stuff is open source but a lot of it is not open source they keep it purposefully proprietary because from their point of view anyways they have all these things that need to pass safety standards and what not they don't want people going out doing things based on their designs that they'll be liable for I was actually not aware why they do that that's interesting I didn't know that well I know the person who started Tesla Motors and it wasn't that guy that everyone's probably thinking about it would not be named it was my friend Martin who started it long before anyone even knew that name that shouldn't be named and he got fired by that guy who shouldn't be named and he had to be sued in order to get his stock back that's a long story but anyways he had to come down in the practical aspect of starting a vehicle company that was going to be competing with General Motors and various other big car companies how do you do that and he wanted things to be open but he didn't want to be liable for things that could destroy the company as well interesting how do you deal with liability issues because it comes up again and again because people are also afraid that their brand gets damaged and so on is there a how to of avoiding liability issues or you just need to hire a lawyer or how do you do it Mitch do you have problems have you had problems personally in that field I have interestingly enough even though TV Begon is a totally open source project there was someone who stole it and that was a former customer as soon as he stole it he was no longer a customer so suddenly there were things that looked exactly like TV Begon remote controls out in the world but with a different box but with my name on it and so I have a bunch of fans when you're open source there are a whole bunch of people who are looking out for you and so within an hour and a half of this thing going out in the market I had like a hundred emails saying what's this this probably isn't you what's going on so I called up my ex-customer by then ex-customer and he said oh yeah you weren't giving us a good enough price so we reverse engineered it and it turned out they did very poorly but they had my name and my trademark on the box so I had to sue them to make them stop because this was a piece of crap so I didn't want to license my name to them because it was just so it would destroy the product because I bought a bunch and a third of them didn't work and the ones that did work didn't work very well. All they had to do was copy exactly my plans which were freely available online and they would have had a great product but it might have cost more than they wanted so they reverse engineered it and made these pieces of crap and I had to hire lawyers. Fortunately my brother's a lawyer and he loves what he does. He recommended someone in the UK where this horrible company was to help me who also loves doing what they were doing and they helped me and that was stressful and it cost me because in the UK in order to stop lawsuits like in the US which is a very litigious society they make it so that it's very, very difficult to even make back all of your legal fees let alone make a profit off of a law case so even if you're 100% in the right and the judge says yes you're 100% in the right the most you ever get back in general is like 65% of your legal fee which became quite high so I lost 65,000 pounds in this process so that I had a bit of money and that I lost money for a year and a half before I started making money again on my product so that was stressful but the thing is we live in a world where maybe you've noticed there's like sort of capitalism all around us and in capitalism anyway people can make money they will including with lawsuits and including by stealing open source projects if they think they can make a quick buck on it so that's what these people did by the way these people are long out of business it didn't work for them it backfired so the thing is we really can't stop that from happening but if we put our thing out in good faith into the world into a context that we believe in chances are much better that things will work out for us there's no guarantees for sure but since actually now when we put out open source projects we have a lot of good will and therefore people are very much willing to help us much more than they would for a proprietary product and there are even lawyers who are willing to give us a little bit of a break and sometimes for free if it's an open project rather than a proprietary project so there's this going for us at least for now I think that's a pretty good transition for this time you spent in China exploring all of the industry all of the things you explored there because China has interesting IP more flexible and more interesting innovation in which would you talk about that I think that's a good moment to discuss I think that would actually be a really good question culturally the idea of open hardware even moving from Europe to the US completely different for different reasons as well like yeah China's again very very much just disappear so I disappeared momentarily for a technical reason but I'm back but I heard what you were talking about China is a very interesting set of circumstances the talk at X-Hane right here before ours was a pre-recorded talk about mythology around China and that was a very interesting talk that's worth looking up if you miss that China is very much a mix back but if you're going to do anything in electronics China is probably the place you're going to have to deal with at least in part because that's the place in the world that has the complete supply chain the whole deal is there. PC boards in general are made there many of the parts are made nearby if not in China they're distributed through China stuff is manufactured in China it's just all of the resources there in general are in China Adafruit is a pretty good exception to this because they try as much as they can to do things locally in their cases in the United States in China it's the most capitalist place in the world despite what the mythology around China claims but there when people want to make money because there's capitalism all around any way they can do it they do and so there's a lot of people who are focused on just making the money and not doing things well so if you're going to do things in China it's really important to or anywhere in the world it's really important to do your homework and to talk to these people and if at all possible to visit because when you visit a place you might find out that they were just telling you what you wanted to hear rather than the reality and also just you can do projects remotely but it's much much better when there's face to face contact and then you get to know people's body language and you can get to see these people are really friendly you learn to trust each other much much quicker and if it's remote and then when there's a misunderstanding and there always will be over email or whatever then you're just like that person's really nice there must be some reason for this misunderstanding and it's much easier to clear up so yeah the PC boards for our little projects we can go to PCB Way or JLCPCB or any of these other big ones and it's really inexpensive to jump start your project this way and it takes very very little money it just takes your time and then once you have that you can find some good manufacturers I found one that I've been with since 2005 and they're fantastic they've helped me so much they take responsibility for when they make a mistake and everyone makes mistakes some companies don't do that and they also are very very happy to help people with their hardware projects even if it's just small quantities and help them put it out into the world and they have a lot of experience at this point and a lot of that experience they gained through helping me put out my projects and we learned together so if anyone out there has a project that they think can benefit from an actual manufacturer in China contact me it's totally fine and I can connect you with them if you get a good feeling maybe they're a good match but you should always ask one or two other companies if you can just to make sure as a reality check and pick the ones that you feel are best for you because the manufacturer you have if you go that route is basically a partner even if they're not a legal partner because they're part of your life everything they do reflects on you and not so much on them but the interesting thing with China is that everything is based on relationships and that's true all over the world but even more so in China so even though it's the case that it's capitalism and people will make money any way they can legally, ethically or otherwise relationships are very valuable there so if they're going to sacrifice a relationship that they've built up with you whether it's for a few days or a few weeks or a few years they're not going to do that lightly just for a quick buck so easily some will but most won't because the relationship is valuable because who knows where that goes in the future it might go nowhere but that connection connects to other people the relationship I have with my manufacturer means that I've recommended and it's one that I value and that they value that means that I've recommended people to them and some of those connections have made them tens of millions of dollars US dollars so that's a super valuable relationship that they don't want to sacrifice with me just to make a quick buck by copying my thing for instance or copying any of the people I recommended to them because that would sever a whole bunch of relationships so learning to navigate all of these things is really valuable and that's part of the bag of tools that we all have to have if we're going to go the route of making a living on our projects and even though that's not necessarily easy I want to encourage people to explore that as a possibility so that we all make a living as all of us do here doing things that are meaningful to us things that we love doing rather than just getting some stupid job that makes us enough money so we can buy food and shelter so we can really have enough time to do things that are meaningful these are both options sorry Mitch Louis Philipp joined also and we do a quick introduction you do a quick introduction yourself maybe and then we use the five minutes of our extra time or something to speak quickly a little bit about open climate and open hardware in that connection or something I suggest yes I'm very happy to be here with you all I was telling everyone before the session that this was a great excuse for us to see each other and turns out I made a horrible mistake of miscalculating the time zone difference so I thought the session was going to start 16 minutes from now and I'm terribly late so I'm really sorry for being horribly late it sucks so I'm not feeling very good right now nobody minds we're just happy we're just happy you're here don't feel bad it's good to see you all so basically I don't want to just interrupt this important conversation about China and open hardware so basically just to say a few words real quick so my name is Philipp I know most of you from our hacker space hardware and free software adventures and different parts of the world I've been I'm one of the founders of the Journal of Open Hardware and I've been involved in free software for a while helping organize the International Free Software Forum Brazil for a while and I'm really interested now and I'm working on a new project in Alaska and I'm interested in open hardware scientific instrumentation how can we bring open hardware to climate research and to create a culture of hardware sharing not only software sharing for scientific research but community science that is grounded in the practices that we developed in free software and open hardware so I'm really dedicated to that I know you are all very interested in this and I think this is an important opportunity for us to discuss that but I will not say anything anymore I'm going to zip up and then we can go back to China and then return to go to the topic of climate later if I may I think there's a great connection and I feel like we can use this you were talking about people cloning project Mitch and I feel like there's probably a way to hack the hackers if we can call him like that or hack the cloners by giving them this fake idea or actually a real one that this particular hardware can be used for other things and they can think oh I can make a lot of money with that and they will replicate your project and make it even more affordable and so that everyone can benefit out of it I think there's some interesting hack of hack that should be thought of there's I was a hacker in residence at a hacker space in Zagreb Croatia called Radiona and they actually came up with that idea that you just said for their project which is an open hardware platform for FPGAs they did not want to they didn't have a budget for one thing but they didn't want to like devote their lives to making a budget and create a company and all of this stuff so that what they wanted to do was to have a Kickstarter project or some kind of crowd source thing that made it look like this is a super popular thing so that some companies in China would just replicate this thing and put it all over the world and then they wouldn't have to do anything so I don't think they ever did that but I just saw their project in the PCB way annual contest which I've been a judge for the last four years and I was just seeing that so they're still working on this project four years later and hopefully things like that will get put out into the world because this is a way for people to make super powerful complicated projects with very inexpensive hardware and so if there are ways to get this out into the world a lot of people can benefit from it I think this topic open source hardware in the science context is very interesting and I want you to raise again my question from the beginning but I want to precise it a little bit more because what I meant with my question at the beginning is is there something which we can call public interest tech in the hardware scene like technology which need to be open like because it has an aim which helps everybody in a kind of sense it's not just like a toaster or something like this I think it's very clear if you look at the pandemic and so on I think there is something but I don't know what you think about this question I think that's really good and I actually had a question which is similar to this that I wanted to add into the mix for this part of the discussion which was I see so many open science tools coming up now and I'm finding that incredibly inspiring and to me I think it's the most important part of open source hardware is this movement within open science it's most interesting to me creating these tools for open science and I think what you just said Maximilian the idea that some technology is in the public interest and therefore it should be shared I think that's really interesting an area of discussion I'm really curious to hear from you Louise what your impressions are being somebody so much into the open science movement what are you seeing a lot of the people come from hardware they come in from software are they scientists who are learning these skills what is the community comprised of in open science and in open science hardware I'd be interested to learn well I think I'm with you in this excitement with the possibilities we have of bringing open hardware and free and open source practices of sharing and community making to the sciences but when it comes to open science more broadly I think it's a very diverse community you have folks who are only in publishing debating questions of publishing and creating platforms from open publishing you have folks who are really into building software for reproducible scientific workflows and us doing the hardware side of things we're a very new and small community but as you said it's really exciting because we're very we come from different parts of the world we're really concerned with the state of science in terms of IP hoarding and in terms of the inequalities that characterize and have been characterizing the field of sciences forever we need to change science as it's being made and making it more accessible so I see that open science is a very complicated rubric right now because you have even actors like corporate actors who had nothing to do with anything open whatsoever who are now trying to join and calling themselves open and involved in open access and I'm talking about Ostevir so it is a complicated rubric so I think there's a lot of work that we need to do to bring what we do in open hardware to open science and I don't think we're quite there yet I think there's more work to do but that would be my impression my personal impression of the state of the field and somehow the feeling that in Germany or in Europe we have the chance to really work on this public money public tech topic because there's also like new government now there's right to repair happening really as a point in the agenda so there is some motion in the right direction I wonder from this US centric perspective or something is there like similar pathways that one can really like tie funding to open hardware and have a similar idea or is this impossible well I wouldn't say it's impossible but it's a hard sell in the United States we have a long history of if anything cool is going to happen we have to get together with other people and do it ourselves we don't rely on the government to do it that's for sure it's interesting that after World War II the United States paid for governments to come together and of course the motivation for economic control the wrong reasons but as a result there's culture here that people expect that if something cool is going to happen the government should pay for it and they should like why don't we have these governments if they're not going to give us some kind of return for the power that we give them but in the United States there is an open there is a right to repair movement going on and there's this one guy Louis Rossman who's been putting out all these incredible videos through the last many years about how to repair things that seem impossible to repair like Apple laptops but he does that and he shows people how to do that and he's been driving this right to repair thing and he got Steve Wozniak the guy who created the first Apple computer which was totally open came out, the Apple 2 but then Steve Jobs came along with my company and then he squeezed all these people out and people lost their shares of stock, similar story to some other people who are kind of dicks but anyway, Steve Wozniak got on board and he's kind of high profile so it's getting some traction so there's possibilities there there's also possibilities that the government people in government are seeing that there's an advantage for more people to see security issues and there's been a lot of security issues you might have noticed that have bitten large corporations in places where they don't want to be bitten because it hurts their quarterly earnings which is a bad thing and then these politicians don't get re-elected if they don't get the money from these corporations but anyways there's possibilities it's not impossible and we should be encouraging that I would say that also something that's been really catching my eye over the last few years in terms of open hardware have been public institutions like CERN who've been publicly funding a great deal of work so CERN this is Particle Accelerated Laboratory thing in Switzerland and they've got an open hardware team and they've in fact that for a number of years they were heavily investing in key CAD as well the open source design tool which massively pushed it on so I do see that there is opportunity because of the centralized funding in Europe there's opportunity to make quite big like so centrally funded like science I guess right there's a lot of like the EU funds gives a lot of money to these institutions whereas I guess in the US and immigrants don't really know there's a lot more defense funding it's less there's a lot of money in the EU for these research things and then there's people that are questioning that so if we're paying for this without taxes then why is this not open and that's a very strong argument because like how can you argue with that like if the citizens are paying for this stuff to be developed then how do they not have access to the papers how are they not allowed to know how the methodology was done how are they not allowed to see that's a very strong argument for open science and open hardware is like hello we're paying for it it should be publicly accessible I think in Germany but this is just a theory that open hardware which comes out of the science sector is kind of like an implicit or maybe explicit push for the economy because sometimes there are start-ups maybe starting out of this I think this is the idea which they have but I don't know so maybe you get this argument if you say here make all of this open hardware and I think we only have a few minutes and there are a lot of questions in our pad I don't know we can't answer all of these in a short time I answered some of them but there is one which is maybe very interesting but it's not possible to end up we could try do you see the interest of hackers looking for bugs in open hardware compared to the interest attracted by bug bounty programs offered by corporations I don't know if somebody is able to answer this very shortly but there are projects that people feel that it's part of they have their heart into it of course they're going to be looking into it but if it's just being motivated by making money there's a whole bunch of people who are motivated only by making money who are going for the ones with big bounties but there was a talk at X-Hane was that yesterday there was a responsible disclosure and that's all stuff that's being driven just because people know it's the right thing to do so if things are open there will be some at least percentage of people who will be doing it just because it's something they're driven to do from inside rather than externally through making more money yes on this topic I think there's opportunities for you know compensating folks for fixing problems but I think what's happening and has been happening I'm working on a project right now it's a small project we're funding a small company an open hardware company called Electronic Cats from Mexico and I'm working with them and we're reporting MicroPython to a microcontroller that is a low power microcontroller SAM series and this is something that I think happens a lot in open hardware and we need to see more of that we need to see investment in fixing problems importing frameworks that we have to different chips so we have alternatives we have a shortage of a particular chip and we can also reuse chips that are not as popular but they're widely available we shouldn't just dispose things as much as we can so other than fixing problems and bugs I think there's also a need for investing heavily into addressing things that we need like Lee was, Alan was talking about CERN the investment that CERN made on KeyCAD that Alan was talking about was massive and that transformed KeyCAD as a project so now KeyCAD is like a breeze and it's lovely to use and before CERN came into the picture KeyCAD was a nightmare it was really hard to use so now it's just that's the importance of investing in the tools that we need so we've got to wrap up now unfortunately we're out of time but just one brief comment before we go a government investing in open hardware open software all these open projects is an investment for the infrastructure for all of society very much like making roads and railroads and all of these other factors that other people pick up on that can then add to the economy in so many huge unknown ways and what we're doing all of us here collectively is adding our little parts of that but if the government got involved that could multiply in a huge way and with that I think really out of time so it's been great seeing all of you I hope we can all be together at a congress all in one wonderful place again and perhaps next year perhaps one of the camps this summer perhaps hope in New York who knows so wait there's an open source hardware summit maybe who knows but that's in May isn't it I always forget the date I always say it wrong it's either in April or May open source hardware summit in New York and there is also I run a festival or you know I theoretically do it's never happened since I've had my new job but there's a in Portland so if anybody is local interested in open hardware do you come along to that then probably in September open source hardware summit who's going is anyone going I'm gonna go that's all hi I feel like if it happens I'm going so yeah super cool thank you all we're doing a little talk tomorrow on the prototype fund hardware at seven same stage yeah and I would love to continue simply but I think we'll have to redo this another time and thank you all thank you so much really nice to see some of you in person for you know not just honestly press the square I'm desperately jealous of Mitch being in Exheim it's really nice to see you thanks a lot everyone for having this discussion here with us on the Exheim stage