Human Practices: The Open Hardware Revolution

In choosing the novel Hardware Track, this years’ Cambridge-JIC iGEM team has come across unexpected challenges. Unsurprisingly perhaps, these have often required us to look into fields of work that we have had little or no previous experience in. This has been particularly true when navigating the world of intellectual property law, including hardware licensing and design copyright. In developing Open Source Hardware (OSH) as part of the competition, we recognised the need for an easily-digestible, comprehensive and hardware-specific guide to ensuring the OSH is accessible to the community.

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design.

OSH is “free as in free speech, not free beer” or more formally Libre rather than Gratis.