It could be. Check out the Global Village Construction Set - a project to open source designs for all the equipment you and thirty of your closest friends would need to check out of the rat race and live independently off-grid.
Love seeing this mentioned! I need to plan a trip to visit his farm given I live in the same state.
I'll follow your link, and also comment to say that what OP mentions sounds like the possible future of Doctorow's Makers.
What does that even mean? Manufacturing is messy, you have to mess with actual physical stuff, it's not just bits. Having all the blueprints for a refrigerator is a long way from being able to actually build it economically.
Imo open source doesnt explicitly mean "you can build it yourself"
What it does stand for is that incase of issues it can be looked at and resolved. Be it finding the broken component, or looking at the designs and reporting the fault. Both of which improve the thing that is open sourced.
As an example : the framework laptop. Its partly open source, so in case of issues i could bring it to a repairshop which then can easily look at the designs, and figure the fault.
Or what i did with my home server sbc : get the schematics, figure out a manufactoring fault ( cracked solder on pci lane ), fix it and report it to the manufacturer ( which then investigated if it was a one off or if a solder type change was needed ).
Depending on the angle, yes. If its for repairs, then yes. If its for product (manufactoring) improvements, then no. Im a software developer that often collaborates with other teams of open source software. I report, and sometimes fix, bugs so it improves the overal product for everyone. I wouldnt put that under right to repair, as it has nothing to do with repairing it yourself and more with improving a product for everyone by tackling a problem with the product at the source.
Having a blueprint skips the "development" phase. Then you make instructions on how to build the stuff and be open to support through issues. From experience it works.
More specifically, I have a generator. It is incased in plastic. It stopped working and it is not designed for large hands. My dad pulled out a generator that is 60 years old and it runs like a charm. Brigs and Stratton motor. Everything is on the outside easy to work on. Why can't someone reinvent it and make it open source.
At that age, there's a great chance that the patent filing on that generator is about to become public property.
Corporations have been working hard to make the common person forget that the only reason patents have ever been granted (officially) was to induce inventors to document their designs for future public use.
It's a big part of why the stuff you can get cheap from China nowadays is often surprisingly good quality, as long as it's an older, tried and true, technology.
You mean to make a documentation on the design and how to build it from scratch? There is the Open-source hardware community which is doing stuff like that; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware
It's just a lot of work and much more complicated than open-sourcing software source code. That is - I guess - why so few people do it. On top of it there are not many people who would reuse it because for most people it's cheaper and good enough to get a modern version from a commercial vendor.
Absolutely it is and it's a growing movement, my 3d printer is old and cheap but it's already stopped me buying a whole class of products (i.e. small plastic fixings and cases) the newer technologies are incredibly cool especially some of the pick-and-place enabled multi toolhead models.
Since I first started following the reprap project home fabrication has increased in quality massively, there are a lot of sites with endless things you can download that have continually improved over the years. CAD and slicers have improved hugely, they're going to continue to at an increasing rate not only as more people use them but coding tools are getting better too - my projects have benefitted hugely from ai streamlining the coding process I'm sure CAD software writers are benefitting too.
We're not too far from ai gen CAD which will be a game changer, having chat gpt style ai help guide you through putting together open source projects will help users too - being able to say 'i need to upgrade the motor in my washing macjine' and ai can help select a range of options 'this motor and that controller or thia controller and that motor...' finding local companies that will fabricate the parts for you so they plug into the bits you fabricate at home, or local companies fabrication open source designs.
Collaborative design projects are the key, I've been working with a few people trying to find methods that make it easy for large amounts of people doing small things to make meaningful progress on big projects. I think it'll become common for most people to be involved in at least some form of collaborative project once people are used to using open source designed items fabricated in the way generics are.
Digital twins also hold a lot of promise along those lines. If we can lower the barrier to make or modify them at least, then even if you don't have the means to actually make something yourself you can still contribute with some level of certainty that it actually makes sense (passing models, and tests for example).
Absolutely, I think general people being able to participate with testing and design ideas would be a huge boost for those that design stuff, it's so difficult having to work out what to try and determining what works, also building information about the product, researching methods and comparing them, etc. I think it could be a really interesting system where there's useful work to be done at every level.
Feasible, yes.
The future? I hope so. We're nowhere near that yet, with the current economic paradigm focusing on patents and profit.
I think there's a guy that's trying to 3d print an entire 3d printer. Maybe he already did it, I haven't been keeping up.
It was the original home 3d printer, but it kinda got overtaken by cheap mass produced printers. Prusa was originally a member.
There are opensource 3d printers, EDM, CNC, Belt grinders, robotic arms, pick in place machines, reflow controllers, plasma cutting tables, lazer cuters, and tractors.
That covers an insane range of what could be made diy, towards mid scale manufacturing using all opensource tools
So yes to one, maybe to the latter. It still takes real labor hours to make all these things so the cost is out of reach for a lot of people. Community owned Maker spaces can be remarkable places to help give people access to tools though. My one I belong to has a couple people making a living making jewelry out of there for example.
In the heavy infrastructure/manufacturing sector it sorta is already. Or maybe I should say it's pretty easy to reverse engineer at least to a given point. You might not know exactly what is going on in the firmware level of your PLC but you know exactly what PLC to buy and can see the user domain code running on it.
The thing is unless you are doing system integration or repair there isn't much use for that knowledge.
I think that is quite a different thing no? Those are standard vs open source implementation. Standards make sure we can interop and we can have some high level assumptions/expectations about something. But open source means we also know HOW does it fulfill the standard. A calculator can perform the operation 1 × 4 just fine, but we won't know HOW it does that. It could be that they have a dedicated circuitry for it or its using the addition circuitry with a parameterized loop.
No it's more than that. When I rip apart s machine I know exactly where to buy each part in it, I usually have the schematic. Any given part breaks and I can fix it
Hmmm, I think that depends very much on the license of the schematic then. Can you share the schematic? Is it in editable form? Yes? Then it is open source, if not then it still is not open source. I think there is a lot to argue about in open sourceness of hardware. And I'm not really qualified to make such an argument, but folks at OpenHardware have IMHO a decent opinion on it.
I feel like you just asked me if a chopstick is a fork. My clients ask me for it and I email them the PDF, I ssk other companies sometimes and they email me the PDF. What license is that?
For hardware, there is a difference between knowing the schematics and actually editing the schematics. You can have all the schematics you want, but when you try to modify it to suit your needs you need to either remake the schematic or if the original file is shared, edit that instead. As I said, this is my opinion and the ease of modification is generally also part of open source. For a simple part, yes it is possible to remake it. But a complex assembly requires significant effort. Say a roller needs to be spaced a certain amount. You may want to tweak those distances. Before you manufacture it, you check what parts need to be changed to accommodate for your modification too.
Well I guess you are talking about PCB schematics, industrial if you don't have the CAD file a PDF converter works fine.
You are right a complex mechanical assembly is not trivial especially since most OEMs are not going, sadly, to put every part in solid works.
It feels like when I am having these discussions about open source hardware that I am speaking a different language. I can reverse engineer the electrical/software for any industrial machine except maybe some complex CNC. And the majority of the time if I need it I can just request it. I just really don't want to. The time and energy to build something from scratch is not trivial.
Just this week I was dealing with a conveyor system I want to rip out and build fresh but took the easy way and debugged it.
Yeah exactly why I said that it is my opinion. But it is not just for PCB assembly, a mechanical assembly too if you only have the mechanical drawings will be quite hard to edit. To me, the ability to easily modify and redistribute something is what makes it open source. If you can only replicate something without the right to modify it then it is just source available.
Probably not. People are lazy consumers and the whole economy is built on it. It's a fine hobby for enthusiasts though.
Interesting idea, but wouldn't it mean that people who have the means of production would get even more power?
Feasible how? It's easily physically feasible. It's not feasible in a capitalistic society though.