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Showing posts from July, 2010

OSHW and design tools

Finally, there's some movement towards a unified concept of what "open source hardware" really is. Adafruit has posted their opinion on the matter for some time , and there have even been a couple of attempts to make an actual license to cover it. What prompted this post is a developing sticking point in the issue: design tools. The discussion below references the " Definition of Free Cultural Works " linked to above. In section 1, "Documenation", find the following passage: The documentation must include design files in the preferred form for which a hardware developer would modify the design. There's a lively Twitter debate (140 characters at a time isn't enough)(and I hate clogging the feeds of non-participants) between myself and Adam and Matt of Wayne and Layne about the implications of this statement regarding the tools which can be used to do the development as well as the file formats used to distribute the design. As a burgeo