Success in the Second Year of the Open Hardware Summit

Jon Masters | OpenSource.com | September 28, 2011

The Open Hardware Summit (OHS), now in its second year, brings together folks from all different backgrounds and truly represents a melting pot of those with interests in the open hardware (open source designs, firmware, software, process) movement. In fact, I’d argue that the open hardware movement is more inclusive than open source software is at this point. There are far more women attending and speaking at these events (OHS is even organized by women), combined with a lot less of the pretentious prima donnas you see in male-dominated open source software.

The keynote was presented by the Arduino team, who addressed issues of scale and running a successful business--software can be entirely free, but hardware has an intrinsic cost, and so there must always be a business model associated with it. More than 300,000 official Arduino Un* parts have been shipped by more than 200 distributors around the world. (I assume these numbers don't relate to clones--the total must be far higher, as even the statistics for software downloads exceed the total given.)