The future is Open-source hardware

Open-source hardware is on its way and it’ll foster a new era of innovation, according to MIT.
The emergence of freely available hardware designs and near-free components will unleash the same sort of technology innovation that open-source software kicked off a decade or so ago, Ito said Tuesday.

“If you want to build a video camera, some day you’ll be able to find all the standard parts, the designs online for free and then you’ll only design the pieces of the product that interest you,” Ito said at an MITX fireside chat in Cambridge, Mass.

Developers would focus their attention on the more valuable hardware they build atop that standard base, just as software developers write specialized software that runs on Linux and open-source middleware instead of proprietary Unix or Windows operating systems and Oracle’s WebLogic or IBM’s WebSphere middleware.

The industry is starting to talk open-source hardware in the context of the Open Compute Foundation which focuses on data center servers. That means far broader application.