Free Hardware and Free Hardware Designs (2015)
gnu.org
gnu.org
And are there any hardware-centric sites where one can find an existing free hardware project to contribute to?
This almost gets you there. It just needs to be tagged as FSF compliant. https://www.producthunt.com/topics/hardware
Going back to before the computer age, scientific publication embodied free hardware design: When you reported a result, you were expected to provide enough information that a reasonably skilled person could replicate your study. This is a principle of scientific methodology that I learned from my parents, who are both scientists. I apply this principle to my projects, and it seems like a reasonable model for folks who want to create reproducible work but have not learned how to use modern project management tools like revision control.
Starting roughly a century ago, people started publishing designs in magazines, for instance in the ham radio literature. An informal tradition (reinforced by the editorial policies of some magazines) was to publish the design and parts list, but offer things like printed circuit boards, parts kits, and even finished units, for a nominal fee. I published a handful of articles in that literature, in the 1990s. By that point, hardware contained code, and the magazine would maintain a source code repository at their website.
Free software grew along the same lines: Magazines would print source code listings that people could type into their microcomputers. I'm sure that scientists shared code informally.
What I think is lacking in hardware, is the kind of organized group activity that we've seen in software: Big open-source projects like Linux or Python. Hardware people, especially hobbyists, just don't know how to create or manage a project like that. I certainly don't. But if you look in the Arduino or Raspberry Pi worlds, you'll find plenty of open hardware designs.
I doubt it's just a matter of price. The main problem may be that open design evolved at a time when stuff was a lot simpler, and not driven by code. In 1980, I took a schematic for a guitar pedal in a magazine, and build one myself, with no copyright issues. You can't copyright a circuit, and it's damn hard to patent one. There was no EULA to prohibit me from taking my gear apart.
An issue with software is that the author has to do something proactive, in order to make it copy-able. That's probably an over-simplification, but at the very least you have to negate the implied copyright by replacing it with something permissive like the MIT license. So, there are "sins of omission" that threaten the open-ness of software (and of hardware containing software) that are only beginning to emerge in the hardware hobby.
Granted, I use hardware that is not considered "free," and don't worry too much about it.
Very interesting times.
https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-releases-f...