Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?

Check this out," Massimo Banzi says. The burly, bearded engineer wanders over to inspect a chipmaking robot—a "pick and place" machine the size of a pizza oven. It hums with activity, grabbing teensy electronic parts and stabbing them into position on a circuit board like a hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds. We're standing in a one-room fabrication factory used by Arduino, the Italian firm that makes this circuit board, a hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders. The electronics factory is one of the most picturesque in existence, nestled in the medieval foothills of Milan, with birdsong floating in through the open doors and plenty of coffee breaks for the white-coated staff. But today Banzi is all business. He's showing off his operation to a group of potential customers from Arizona. Banzi scoops up one of the boards and points to the tiny map of Italy emblazoned on it. "See? Italian manufacturing quality!" he says, laughing. "That's why everyone likes us!" Indeed, 50,000 Arduino units have been sold worldwide since mass production began two years ago. Those are small numbers by Intel standards but large for a startup outfit in a highly specialized market. What's really remarkable, though, is Arduino's business model: The team has created a company based on giving everything away. On its Web site, it posts all its trade secrets for anyone to take—all the schematics, design files, and software for the Arduino board. Download them and you can manufacture an Arduino yourself; there are no patents. You can send the plans off to a Chinese factory, mass-produce the circuit boards, and sell them yourself — pocketing the profit without paying Banzi a penny in royalties. He won't sue you. Actually, he's sort of hoping you'll do it.

That's because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and his team have spent precious billable hours making the thing, and they sell it themselves for a small profit — while allowing anyone else to do the same. They're not alone in this experiment. In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens of hardware inventors around the world have begun to freely publish their specs. There are open source synthesizers, MP3 players, guitar amplifiers, and even high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You can buy an open source mobile phone to talk on, and a chip company called VIA has just released an open source laptop: Anyone can take its design, fabricate it, and start selling the notebooks.

Banzi admits that the concept does sound insane. After all, Arduino assumes a lot of risk; the group spends thousands of dollars to make a batch of boards. "If you publish all your files, in one sense, you're inviting the competition to come and kill you," he says, shrugging.

Then again, Linux sounded pretty insane, too, back in 1991, when Linus Torvalds announced it. Nobody believed a bunch of part-time volunteers could create something as complex as an operating system, or that it would be more stable than Windows. Nobody believed Fortune 500 companies would trust software that couldn't be "owned." Yet 17 years later, the open source software movement has been crucial to the Cambrian explosion of the Web economy. Linux enabled Google to build dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl and Ruby have become the lingua franca for building Web 2.0 applications; and the free Web-server software Apache powers nearly half of all Web sites in the world. Open source software gave birth to the Internet age, making everyone—even those who donated their labor—better off.

Can open source hardware do the same thing?

Every open source project begins with an itch that needs scratching. Linux was launched when Torvalds decided he didn't like the operating systems available to him. The top three—Microsoft's DOS, Apple's operating system, and Unix—were all expensive and they were closed; Torvalds wanted a system he could tinker with. As it happened, a lot of other geeks wanted the same thing. So when Torvalds began working on Linux and sharing his code, other hackers were willing to pitch in and help improve it for free—creating a virtual workforce that was infinitely bigger and smarter than Torvalds himself. That is the central benefit of open source projects: They're like a barn raising in which everyone gets to use the barn. Somebody has a problem and creates a tool to solve it. And once the tool is created, hey—why not share it? The hard work has already been done. Might as well let others benefit.