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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Plans for building a birdhouse are completely incomparable to what the parent is talking about. This would be like me having an "open source" birdhouse design where the birdhouse is made of glued-together Intel™ processors.

Sure I've opened the schematics, but unlike a birdhouse made from wood you have zero chance of being able to build one from scratch on your own, or sourcing the Intel™ processors from another vendor.

This is the same reason for why if I release the binary of a program produced with a secret compiler as "open source" I'll be laughed at, it completely goes against the spirit of the thing, which is that anyone should be able to change any part of the thing I've released.

It's good that they're doing this. But it's completely incomparable to actual fully open source hardware.

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Well IMO "open source hardware design" can have items in their bill-of-materials whose design themselves are not open source. I think that's where we'd end up disagreeing on terminology.

Open source gives you the ability to fork the design. An Open Source birdhouse made of Intel processors could be forked and made from AMD ones.

This is some kind of confluence of the values of FSF captial-F "Free" style software with the more pragmatic goals associated with open source.

We've eclipsed the usefulness of this birdhouse analogy, but suffice to say being able to replace one proprietary commercial vendor with another doesn't make something open source.

    > This is some kind of confluence of the values of
    > FSF captial-F "Free" style software with the more
    > pragmatic goals associated with open source.

Well, pragmatically, if you needed to alter the hardware of this "open source" hardware what percentage of the total electronic complexity would you be working with? I'm going to aim for a conservative one-digit percentile.

There's a real and unambiguous line to be drawn in the sand here. If you get "open source" plans for hardware that you can't replicate with third-party fabrication & your own materials it's not open source. It's just a recipe for assembling commercial proprietary components.

It's awesome that people publish those recipes, but don't call it open source hardware and dilute the meaning of hardware that is genuinely open.

Don't conflate 'electonic' with being the only valuable thing here.

Some of the most active areas of research in data center design are around the mechanical design to maximize cooling.

Couldn't one use the same reasoning to argue that open-sourcing an iOS app isn't really "open source", since you need proprietary hardware to properly run it?

I think the crucial difference is that when you talk about "open source X" it means that any aspect of X can be modified as you please. Obviously when you're talking about an open source iOS app it's understood that the underlying OS isn't open source.

Since there is hardware that is actually open in that sense it's worthwhile to distinguish whether you're talking about open hardware or merely open plans for assembly of closed hardware.

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