Open Source Hardware certification update

The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) has updated their certification:

After almost a year and a half of community discussion, OSHWA unveiled the Open Source Hardware Certification Program at the 2016 Open Hardware Summit. Today, with the help of a major grant from the Sloan Foundation, we are excited to announce that we are taking major steps towards Certification 2.0. The original certification program has some fairly straightforward goals. It is designed to make it easy for creators to identify their hardware as compliant with the community definition of open source hardware, as well as make it easy for users to know that hardware that is advertised as “open source” meets their expectations. The certification process gives a creator confidence that they have done everything required to call their hardware open source. The certification logo gives users confidence that they will be able to access, build upon, and hack any hardware that they receive. We didn’t know what to expect when we launched the certification program and have been blown away by the results. There are currently 170 certified hardware projects from 18 countries on 5 continents participating in the program.[…]

OSHWA Certification 2.0

Open Hardware Summit 2016 date announced

The date/location for the 2016 Open Hardware Summit has been announced:

October 7, 2016

Portland, Oregon

Here’s their definition of Open Source Hardware:

Definition (English)

Drew has a new blog post on why OSH matters:

Open Source Hardware (OSHW), why it matters and what is pseudo OSHW

I wonder why (OSHWA, Linux Foundation, FreeBSD Foundation, Free Software Foundation) isn’t involved with local communities like Hackster, focusing on OSH subset of hardware (and the FSF definition of Free Hardware), and work on crowdfunding of new devices with these projects, perhaps as Open Compute Projects, not just random ‘blinky lights’ artsy ‘open hardware’. Maybe the enterpreneurs that run Hackster should get involved, projects for them, and may be able to help with this cat herding problem with their platform, perhaps in conjunction with CrowdSupply…

https://www.hackster.io/

OSHWA announces Open Source Hardware Certification v1

Excerpting the initial text:
Open Source Hardware Certification Version 1

This is version 1 of an official certification for open source hardware housed in the Open Source Hardware Association.  It outlines the purpose and goals of such a certification, and establishes the mechanisms for the operation of the certification process itself.

Primary Goals
*  Make it easier for the public to identify open source hardware.
*  Expand the reach of open hardware by making it easier for newer members to join the open source hardware community.

Read the full document:

Open Source Hardware Certification Version 1

http://2015.oshwa.org/

Open Hardware Summit program announced

The Open Hardware Summit is the annual conference of The Open Source Harware Association (OSHWA), the world’s first comprehensive conference on the Open Source Hardware movement. This year’s summit will be on September 19, 2015 in Philadelphia, PA. The speakers and program have just been announced:

Keynote:
* AnnMarie Thomas, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering, the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, and the Opus College of Business at University of St. Thomas

Science and Education:
* Ben Leduc-Mills. Open Hardware, Open Minds: The Rise of Open Hardware in Academia and K-12 Education
* Nancy Ouyang. The Rise and Fall of an Open Source Hardware Company
* Peter Marchetto. Open Hardware in Community/Citizen Science
* Ryan Fobel, Christian Fobel, Michael Dryden and Aaron Wheeler. DropBot: an Open-Source Platform for Lab Automation
* Joshua Pearce. Making Open Hardware the New Standard in Science
* Hugo Boyer. Open Source Robotics Foundation and the Robotics Fast Track

Workflow: From Chip to Product:
* Eric Wilhelm. Overview
* Sanket Gupta and Sam Wurzel. Common Parts Library
* Andreas Olofsson. Open Source Chip Design: The Final Frontier
* Hannah Stewart and James Tooze. Circularity and Community Factories – Logic and Geographies of Redistributed Manufacture and Makespaces
* J. Eric Townsend (aka jet). Foundation for a Common Object Description Language
* J. Simmons. Demonstration of Open Source Engineering Analysis and Parametric CAD Modeling for OSHW
* Kipp Bradford. Successfully Manufacturing your Open Source Hardware

Case Studies: Projects and Processes:
* Catarina Mota. History of Open Source
* Joshua Lifton. A Tale of Two Laptops: Case Studies in Open Consumer Electronics
* James Parr. ULTRASCOPE: Automated Robotic Observatory (ARO)
* Myles Cooper, Grace Ahn, Elizabeth Doyle and Michael Searing. Investigating Normal – Hacking Prosthetics
* Bevan Weissman and Dan Beyer. Dynamic Infrastructure for Social Innovation

The Role of Open Hardware Going Forward:
* Benedetta Piantella. Humanitarian Open Source Tech Projects
* Bruce Boyes. What the Wright brothers Can Teach us about Open Source vs Closed Source
* Tega Brain and Surya Mattu. Unfit Bits: Free your Fitness Data from Yourself
* Pedro Oliveira and Xuedi Chen. Open Source Riots – Appropriating Technologies for Protests of the Future
* Tom Igoe. Speaking In Tongues and Catching Flies: OSH and Connected Devices

Program

RMS on Free Hardware from LibrePlanet 2015

The Free Software Foundation has released some of the videos from LibrePlanet 2015. The presentation from RMS is described as:

Free software, free hardware, and other things by Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. Richard gives his take on some major issues facing the world of free software and explains how the free software philosophy extends to hardware.

It is a 45-minute video, the first 23 minutes are presentation, the remainder are QA. Video is here:
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/richard-stallman-free-software-free-hardware/

I have few questions of my own, from watching it:

At the beginning, he mentions that remote attestation of TPM doesn’t work, without any details on why he thinks that. I don’t understand what he’s talking about, there are multiple TNC implemenations, as well as non-TNC equivalent solutions that use TPM for network attestation. Linux-based Chrome OS, StrongSwan for Linux, Linux-IMA or OpenAttestation (OAT) for example.
If someone has more background on his perspective on remote attestation of TPM doesn’t work, please speak up. Heck, even the UEFI firmware on most modern systems have TNC support. IMO, it would have been more interesting to hear a discussion about new TPM 2.0 features, as well as TrustZone on ARM, and how that impacts various Free Software/Firmware/Hardware movements.
https://github.com/OpenAttestation/OpenAttestation/wiki
https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/TrustedNetworkConnect
http://linux-ima.sourceforge.net/

Later, he talks about “Free Hardware” term, which AFAICT isn’t that well-defined, and recommends using GPLv3 for hardware, and doesn’t mention OSHWA license, except to say that the alternatives offer no value. I am not sure that the existing OSHWA has the same opinion as RMS with his “Free Hardware” perspective, see March-April thread on the OSHWA list. IMO, Free Hardware -vs- Open Hardware needs some clarification. I guess, like with software, we’ll have the Open camps and the Free camp, with FSF as the Free owner and OSHWA instead of OSI for the Open camps, in addition to the Closed camps. However, unlike ISVs, I’ve never met an OEM or IHV that likes the GPL, so any Free Hardware will likely have to be community-funded, like Novena; I hope the FSF plans community-funded Free Hardware in the coming months.
https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2012/fall/a-bit-about-free-hardware
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/need-free-digital-hardware-designs/
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/richard-stallman-how-to-make-hardware-designs-free/
http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-March/thread.html
https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena