(This is the last part of a 5-part series on open source – parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Jee Labs is an open source shop – both open source hardware and open source software.

Nothing earth-shattering: I’m exploring what’s possible in the domain of physical computing, and have been focusing on simple ATmega-based wireless sensor networks for in and around the house. A simple variation on the Arduino theme, really. In fact, it’s pretty hard not to be compatible with an Arduino when your stuff is based on the same Atmel AVR chips. Because in terms of basic functions and software, an Arduino is (at least right now) essentially simply an ATmega on a board. Plus a serial port boot loader.

This “computing stuff tied to the physical world” is a lot of fun. And a lot of work.

There’s a substantial amount of software required for all this, from dealing with wireless to collecting, storing, and presenting measurement data. And that’s just going one way – to also robustly (and securely) control things in the house, there’s also this whole field of domotics to go into.

I love doing software development. I spend most of my time on it.

And with Jee Labs involved in both OSH and OSS, there is finally a way to dedicate all my time to this stuff.

It’s a very simple mechanism: the hardware side funds the software side.

Does that make Jee Labs a commercial undertaking? Yep. Small shop, but it’s about as direct as it gets:

Stuff sold => food on the table => hunger gone => happy coding.

So I’m hired by the shop to do the hardware and software side of things. As long as there is funding, I get to spend all my time on this stuff. All of it in the open, described on a public weblog, and with all designs usable by anyone to do whatever they like with it. Try it out, hack it, extend it, rip it apart, get rich with it, or ignore it – it’s all up to you. There’s nothing to steal, because your gain is not my loss. On the contrary.

Quite a few people have already done things like take the RF12 driver (software) and use it with their own hardware designs. Many others are taking some sensors (hardware) and tying it into their stuff with their own software. Cool – way cool, in fact. Hardly a day goes by without something encouraging or rewarding happening on some front.

The trick is sustainable funding. Which means I need to stay on the ball, and figure out what others would like to see from me. That’s good – normal market economics, really. There’s a lot of uncharted terrain, still waiting to be discovered, explored, and turned into projects and products. Just gotta look, listen, and keep moving. Which is a lot easier when everything is out in the “open” – hardware, software, … and ideas.

This concludes my mini-series on Open Source. It’s time to return to the techy stuff again!

(This is part 4 of a 5-part series on open source – parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

For OSS (S as in software), “open” is all about collaboration. Yeah, sure, there’s a lot of re-invention and not everyone is willing to share when it matters (i.e. real innovation), but even just the collaboration of developers (producers) and users (consumers) is fruitful in the sense that bugs get exposed, investigated, and fixed. Even if asymmetric, this leads to faster evolution and better software.

And even if not always, OSS projects do tend to attract a lot of talent, and talent breeds creative solutions and excellence. Because of the low barrier to entry, the potential talent pool is huge. It doesn’t take a lot of talented / motivated people to make exceptional software. Collaboration among developers is the norm, not the exception – and the visibility helps, even if only by attributing status to the team participants.

With OSH (H as in hardware), things are a bit different. Sure, there too the exchange between producers and consumers helps create better products, no matter how asymmetric the groups are. Got a problem? Submit it to the forum, and it’ll be out for all to see so the producer(s) better get his/her/their act together.

But the numbers are different. Very different. The barriers to entry are a lot higher – designing hardware and actually building working “stuff” is hard and requires specific skills. It’s error prone, time-consuming, and above all it costs real money. You need equipment and inventory, the prototype turnaround times take ages when you’re doing this on a budget, and serious testing can be extremely difficult. Not to mention getting production QA up to scratch and the QC yield high enough.

Want some examples? Try “Chumby” or “Adafruit”, each driven by amazingly talented and dedicated people. Exercise for the reader: find out how many people are behind each of these OSH shops…

What about the Arduino boards? Well, to be honest, I have no idea who designed them, nor what discussion is going on about them for future developments. The Arduino “Mega” sort of dropped out of the sky once it was on the shelf.

Because, you see, selling hardware generates income. And any income, say N dollars, divided by anything but 1 would be less than N. What seems to be happening right now, is that OSH producers are indeed “open”, but only after the designs have been created, tested, and manufactured. All the hardware work has been done, all the choices and decisions have been made, and all the time-consuming steps have already been taken.

So OSH “shops” are in fact putting a fairly large distance between themselves and any potential contributors (and competitors). Want to see, use, or even alter what they do? Fine – but not before they’ve got their revenue streams set up.

Don’t get me wrong. This is absolutely everybody’s full right. To be an entrepreneur means you get to take the initiative and you get to make all the choices you want. That’s the whole point. It’s just not really open.

I’m not even sure it could be done any differently. At some point, as producer, you’ve got to have an advantage over others to be able to justify the time, effort, and money spent on whatever it is you do. And given that most supermarkets want money to hand over the ingredients for your meals, incentives tend to work best if they too are in terms of money…

But there’s preciously little collaboration going on. Ideas aren’t flowing freely, far from it. And as with OSS, some people are waiting on the sidelines, trying to soak up as much info as they can, and keeping ideas to themselves to try and create their own revenue source when the time is ripe.

There’s nothing inherently “wrong” with that.

I’m the same – ask me about what my plans are, how I solved some tricky issues, and I might give you an evasive answer… because I’m afraid someone might “beat me to the punch”, or become a competitor.

It looks like OSH is being treated as a zero-sum game, i.e. “your gain is my loss” and vice-versa. I’m not sure it actually is, even w.r.t. money. In fact, as far as ideas go, I’m convinced that it definitely isn’t – ideas breed more ideas, infinitely so. We just need to figure out and implement the mechanisms which encourage the flow of ideas. Right now, neither OSS nor – especially – OSH are quite there yet.

In the first part of this series I started out by saying that there is hypocrisy involved. Whoa, that’s a big word. Let me explain…

First, allow me to summarize: with OSS there is usually no money involved – it all runs on voluntary contributions and team participation. With OSH, on the other hand, there is always money in the equation, because “stuff” is involved, i.e. real atoms, not just bits. And once money flows, normal / healthy economics will lead to revenues, profits, and income, no matter how modest or at what scale. Fine. Cool, even.

Except… with physical computing, there is always both hardware and software (call it “firmware” if you like). The hardware makes things possible, the software makes things happen. Either one is useless without the other. Yin and yang. Yet hardware and software are quite different beasts, and require quite distinct skill sets, so the people doing (“good at”) the hardware are often not the same as the people doing (“good at”) the software.

If I were involved in the hardware side of physical computing, and wanted to get rich (a real possibility, since there is money involved), I’d work like crazy on the hardware, and then kick it out into the world (i.e. sell it) with the minimum amount of software I can get away with. I wouldn’t put it that way of course, but I’d say “hey, I did my part, now someone else kick in to finish the other part”.

Then I’d sit back, or rather: participate just enough to keep up appearances. Build a community, take the lead, create the infrastructure for (software-only!) collaboration, and – pardon the bluntness – rake in the money…

If I were involved in the software side of physical computing, I’d design my own hardware and set up a shop to generate a revenue stream, so that I’d have at least a chance of funding some of my software efforts. Because I wouldn’t know how to sustain the necessary Open Source Software development for it in any other way.

I’ll leave it to the reader to be the judge as to what extent the above is happening today, and I urge you to look well beyond what I am doing with my little Jee Labs setup…

All I’ll add to conclude with, is that Open Source Hardware is not nearly as open and collaborative on the hardware side and in the design phase at it could be, and that the Open Source Software efforts which need to take place to make such hardware tick are not funded nearly as well as they should be to become truly attractive / sustainable.

And that’s a crying shame. Because somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to freely exchange ideas and benefit as a whole community from the potential of absolutely explosive creative growth. As it stands today, OSS and OSH are fine at spreading and even democratizing technology, but in effect stifling innovation. Open? How?

In tomorrow’s last episode – my feeble attempt to come clean, with Jee Labs. No climax. No grand finale.

(This is part 3 of a 5-part series on open source – parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

On the side of open source hardware (OSH), the situation is less rosy.

The tricky part with OSH is that it’s about “stuff”. And stuff costs money right from the outset – to collect, to manufacture, to move around, to keep in stock, to use, to dispose of (OSS also has costs, btw – but indirectly, in the form of invested time, effort, and expertise).

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with money. Once money enters the picture, you can do things like add a margin to cover the costs. Or add a fat margin to cover more than the costs. Or pay others to get involved and bring in specific expertise. Which is way cool. Now we’re talking economy. And sustainability. And incentive. And of course: bread-on-the-table, i.e. income.

Oh yes, this is potent stuff. Markets. Resources. Competition. Profits. Investments. Capitalism!

The reason I’m pointing it out is that it’s a fundamental difference between OSH and OSS. And it’s obvious – everyone knows that to use software, you just gotta go to the proper site and download it. And to use stuff, you gotta purchase it and wait for it to be delivered on your doorstep (or go shopping and take it home, whatever).

We’ve all just been through the Christmas season. Shop ’til you drop. Pay and get.

But wait a minute… that’s for any kind of stuff. What’s “open source” hardware got to do with this? Well, you see, that’s where it gets a bit unusual.

Open source hardware means that the producers “open up” about what they are doing. In the electronics / physical computing / kits domain, the idea is to make the designs for the products openly available, often in the form of schematics and printed circuit board designs.

What’s the point? Well, you’re not locked-in, presumably. If you don’t like the design, you could take it and modify it according to your own wishes. Amazingly, this doesn’t seem to happen a lot. I can think of three reasons: economies of scale, interface conventions, and tools/skills.

The production of printed circuits is very much driven by economies of scale. It’s relatively expensive to create all the masks to produce good 2-layer PCB’s, with silk screens, via’s, solder masks, etc. So it makes a lot of sense for a supplier to have a certain number of PCBs made at once, and then sell individual boards at a cost lower than one-off production could. This is the traditional manufacturer’s sweet spot – it just happens to apply to tiny shops as well now, instead of just car manufacturers.

And hey, you know what? It’s great: all these manufacturers do us a service, by producing tons of goods of which we only need one, at fantastically attractive prices.

Another reason for not just starting from what there is and inventing tons of variations, is that an important aspect of a design is its interface with the rest of the world. This is particularly obvious with physical computing. Once you change interfaces (whether electrical, mechanical, or logical), you risk reducing inter-operability. This doesn’t apply just to OSH – think of all the “after-market” accessories in numerous domains. Many product choices end up affecting a lot more than that product itself over time.

The third reason why OSH isn’t spurring as much collaboration and innovation is that there’s often a fairly steep learning curve involved. It took me quite a lot of time and effort to learn how to design printed circuits, and how to have them manufactured. In fact, I made a ridiculous number of mistakes along the way, and had to throw away lots of failed trials. That’s not just wasted time and effort – that’s wasted “stuff”, and real money.

So it’s not surprising that not everyone grabs OSH designs and starts tinkering with them and producing their own boards. The process is non-trivial, takes time, and wastes money. We’d much rather buy ready-made products, or at least partially-made (including kits), with all the errors resolved so we can avoid them.

Again, this is great. Some people out there are willing to do the hard work, and others pick the fruits of their labor and compensate them for it.

Just keep in mind that here too, OSH is totally different from OSS. In a way, OSH solved the problem which OSS was never able to: to create a natural mechanism for rewarding time and effort spent.

So in a way, OSH could be called a success story. OSH seems to be picking up steam like crazy these days. Need an example? Try “Arduino”.

But wait, not so fast…

To be continued tomorrow – Open? Really?

(This is part 2 of a 5-part series on open source – parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

With open source software (OSS), the immediate costs are generally very low. Get a computer and an internet connection (which you probably would anyway), and you’ve got all the expenses covered to benefit from OSS – and participate in its development. Infinite audience, negligible variable costs, very low barrier to entry. Other than your own time, skills, and effort.

The result? Explosive growth – SourceForge lists some 160,000 projects (or 380,000, depending where you look). Its two top projects (file sharing), have been downloaded half a billion times each.

Is it good? Sure, let a thousand OSS projects bloom, or more, why not.

But there’s also a lot of wheel re-invention going on (I should know, I’m an expert on that!). Some of it, and I fear quite a bit more than most people would be inclined to acknowledge, is extremely unfortunate: “hey, feature/app X in language Y is neat, let’s redo it in language Z!”

Is OSS leading to innovation? I’m not so sure. I suspect that when people stumble upon a potentially truly great idea, they will be tempted to re-consider whether they really want to share that idea with the world, and risk diluting it – by others adding more ideas (in the best scenario), or by others adopting it and succeeding at drawing more attention and claiming credit for it.

Another major hurdle is that turning an innovative idea into an innovative solution requires a lot of hard work. For “big” innovations, you’ll need to get all the right volunteers involved and motivated, have excellent people skills, and show true leadership. It’s easy to hit a wall somewhere along the road and lose interest before the product is finished (I should know, I’ve been there far too often).

It wouldn’t surprise me if for all the people sharing their ideas and working on them in public, there were at least as many others soaking up everything they can find and thinking “hey, maybe I can do something with this and become famous” – or even rich, by switching to a closed source software model. Even the GPL can’t fully prevent that, as long as you keep your software secret (and don’t get caught by having “similar bugs”!). The mere prospect of that happening can drain all motivation from an open source developer (see also: Prisoner’s Dilemma).

So all in all, my impression is that OSS isn’t all that innovative and collaborative as it’s often cracked up to be. Do you need an example? How about “Google”, which was built on the shoulders of open source. Sure, they do give back a lot, also in the form of open source. In fact, they provide what is arguably the greatest free service on the internet. But genuine collaboration w.r.t. their core innovations? No way.

There’s nothing “wrong” at all with this, btw. It’s just not really open.

To be continued tomorrow… Open Source Hardware

(This is the first part of a 5-part series on open source – parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Jee Labs is an open source shop – both open source hardware and open source software.

There is money involved in open source. And there is hypocrisy. Let me explain…

The basic idea of open source, is literally to make the source of things freely available – and more or less allow reuse. With software, it usually comes down to making the source code publicly available to anyone. With hardware, the common approach is to make all design files publicly available to anyone.

Depending on the model, you’re either allowed to do anything you like with it (all the way to hiding it inside your own for-sale stuff), or you have to at least maintain the proper attribution to the original author(s), or you restrict the use to projects which accept to be bound by the same rules as yours – preventing anyone from running away (and perhaps getting rich) with the original stuff and not letting anyone know they did so.

The “do anything you like with it” approach basically says: you can’t really steal it, because the author treats his/her work more as a form of self-expression than as promotion of something which deserves to be rewarded (whether monetary of in terms of fame). The latter “only on my terms” approach says “hey, as author I’m entitled to benefit at least as much as anyone else if there is any commercial value”.

I am (thank goodness) not a lawyer, so please treat all of the above as no more than my personal attempt to summarize what this is all about.

Newsgroups have overflowed and probably even been shut down because of debates on the differences between all the “licensing” approaches – (flame) wars have been waged about all this, and probably still do. Been there, done that. Yawn.

But in my view, all the open source approaches are minor variations of the same basic concept. The term “open source” itself is actually an amazing success, in that it manages to capture the essence despite all the factions and disagreements. It’s about volunteer effort, the power of gifts, competence, creativity, and the freedom of choice and re-use this approach offers.

Above all, open source is about enabling collaboration. Because, you see, the big differentiator of open source is that all ideas can be out in the open. When there is no need to protect ideas, there is also no need to restrict the flow of information. And, well… we’ve got this thing called the internet which happens to be friggin’ good at shuttling information (and ideas) around the globe.

So far so good. But there are a couple of weird things going on…

To be continued tomorrow… Open Source Software