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Our Blogs Open Sauce LCA2009: Making open hardware work
Our Blogs Open Sauce LCA2009: Making open hardware work | LCA2009: Making open hardware work |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Monday, 19 January 2009 | |
  
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When it comes to open hardware, however, one is talking about something that is rare. And that's a thing which Australian engineer David Rowe would like to change. Rowe is not some big-time industrialist. He is a geek with a conscience who has seen a way of doing the world some good and also making a living for himself. Three years ago, he began the Free Telephony Project to build an affordable IP-PABX system using free software and hardware. This morning at the Australian national Linux conference in Hobart, he spoke for a while about what he has developed, the way he went about it and the ups and downs of such a business model. Rowe says the basic way of going about developing open hardware is the same as software - you publish designs and encourage others to hack on them. It's a bit of an experiment, says Rowe who has a background in telephony hardware and software development. He began the project after he discovered Blackfin uClinux, embedded Linux which had been ported to the Blackfin processor. The first product Rowe has begun selling is known as the IPO4, a four-port embedded IP-PBX running the open source Asterisk software, ideal for small homes and offices. The project tooks its inspiration from two other open hardware projects and collaborative development was carried out using open source tools and a version control system. Rowe says development was very fast because of this model - he could hack on things during the daylight hours in Australia and then turn his code over to fellow developers in Europe to work on during their regular working hours. He partnered with a Chinese company, Atcom, for volume production and says that he was able to get high-quality products for a very low cost. "You can be an effective competitor to traditional closed source models," Rowe said. He said the model worked due to peer review and the fact that, as many others have said, many eyes make bugs shallow. There was a wealth of open source software to work with and one came to realise one of the secrets of hardware - it is 95 per cent software, he said. |
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