Makers and open source

At SCALE 13x in Los Angeles, Ruth Suehle spoke about the "maker" movement and its relationship to the open-source community—but she made it clear that, despite the affinity that the communities feel for each other, there are some stark differences between the two. The most troubling difference is that, particularly in recent years, the maker movement has drifted toward an "open by accident" model, without a strong commitment to freely sharing information. But open-source advocates can bring the maker movement back around, she said, by showing how they have addressed tricky problems like license compatibility and the challenge of making money while "giving everything away."

Suehle, who called herself a maker at heart, started off with a historical look at "making" in the physical world, from the advent of stone-age tools up through modern electronics. Sharing information is a through-line that permeates this history: early humans had to share information from person to person, she said. Imagine what the outcome would have been if one cave man refused to discuss discovering fire, she suggested.

But in much more recent times, people decided to stop sharing their knowledge. The ancient Greek city-state of Sybaris granted a patent-like protection to cooks, safeguarding their recipes against imitators for a year. A bit later, Roman blacksmiths started putting literal "trade marks" on their wares. In the 6th Century, the Irish missionary Saint Columba sparked one of the first conflicts over copyright when an abbot objected to Columba's practice of hand-copying books. The modern framework for patents originated with glassmakers in 1600s Venice—and rapidly spread to the rest of the world.

We now live in a world with contradictory messages about sharing, Suehle said. One of the first lessons children are taught is that sharing is important but, ironically, the adults who do the teaching no longer believe in the principle. In effect, they say "you should share your toys ... just as long as they're not my toys." This viewpoint, along with the rise of disposable consumer goods culture, led to the decline of fixing and repairing one's own property, she said.

The maker movement (at least, in the modern sense) started off as a revival of this older interest in fixing and modifying things. Suehle pointed out that the maker movement coincided with the prominence of "steampunk"—which just happens to be a throwback to an earlier era when technology was about hands-on work and tangible machinery.

Open by accident

Given its roots in the historical practice of sharing information, she said, it might seem like the maker movement should be enthusiastically committed to an "open by default" ethic. But that is not the way the maker movement is trending. Similarly, the open-hardware movement, while more formal about its principles than the decentralized maker movement, also seems to be drifting away from open-by-design ideas, with projects keeping certain parts of their work secret. Instead, she said, the movement seems to feature openness by accident, with people sharing their projects online solely because it is the "Internet age" and the Internet is the easiest way to publicize something.

By way of example, Suehle described her trip to the Open Hardware Summit in 2012. She went expecting to see lots of strong connections to the open-source movement, she said—but came away with deep concerns. Her write-up of the event for Opensource.com was headlined "Open Hardware Summit open to hybrid models," an assessment that she told the SCALE crowd was putting things optimistically.

In actuality, she found it deeply disconcerting how many high-profile speakers at the summit had downplayed or openly rejected the ideals of transparency and openness. She quoted keynote speaker Chris Anderson, who started off his talk by saying: "Everything I've learned as I built my own business is because people shared what they knew." But he followed that up a few minutes later with a different sentiment entirely, saying "I don't think we should be dogmatic. We need to consider other possibilities and approaches to open-based innovation."

In a more extreme example, she pointed out that Makerbot founder Bre Pettis had said in 2011 that "In the future, people will remember businesses that refused to share with their customers and wonder how they could be so backwards." But less than a year later, Makerbot took its previously open-hardware products closed. Pettis made that announcement at the summit:

Later, during his keynote at the event, Pettis referenced the community's reaction:

The same story was found at Maker Faires, Suehle said. In early years, the events were dominated by booths from Sparkfun and Radio Shack where visitors could learn to solder. Today, the exhibitors are predominantly there selling products—and, in many cases, products with (at best) tenuous connections to the maker movement, like Purina's latest line of cat feeders.

How open source can help

Suehle also noticed that essentially no one at these events was running Linux, which is telling. The maker community seems to be struggling today with many of the same problems that the open-source community solved ten years ago. Those problems include how to cope with project cloning, how to address legal issues, how to work with the user community, and how to make money.

The cloning issue, she said, is what Makerbot "freaked out" about, causing the company to take its Replicator2 printer proprietary. But there are plenty of success stories among those companies who release only open-source products—Suehle's employer, Red Hat, being one, she said. And there are examples of successful open hardware closely tied to the open-source software world. The Raspberry Pi, she said, has been cloned and modified and duplicated many times; "if there's a fruit, somebody has made a 'Pi' board for it," she said. Yet that has not diluted the popularity or success of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's products.

Makers and open hardware projects have legal concerns distinct from open source, she said. While open-source software is driven by copyright licensing, factors other than copyright are involved when dealing with physical objects. The community has developed two separate open-hardware licenses: one from CERN and one from Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR). Both, interestingly enough, are named "Open Hardware License." Reconciling them may prove difficult, but that is the sort of problem that the open-source community has dealt with many times in the past.

Suehle pointed out that the open-source movement resolved many of its difficulties by working through them as a community, which the maker movement will probably do as well. Today much of the maker movement community is found in local and regional hackerspaces. The hackerspaces are often isolated from one another, but there are examples where the movement is working together in large-scale, national or international efforts, which is a promising sign. She gave the open medical-device community as a key example.

The next challenge for the maker movement will be to figure out viable business models that can make money, she said. Many of the movement's highest-profile successes have been crowdfunding campaigns. They can have positive benefits, such as building an interested user community before launch, but they are still far from an instant-success formula.

The good news, Suehle said in conclusion, was that the drift away from "open by default" thinking among a few key players in the maker movement by no means spells disaster. Ultimately, the maker movement is made up of millions of people, and the open-source community can help them re-center themselves. Makers are a community that like to adapt and that thrive on innovation.

The open-source community knows both of those principles well—Suehle pointed out that open-source developers are, in fact, "makers" in their own right. The question is, what will the open-source community do to make things better in the maker movement, and to encourage the maker movement's virtuous cycle of innovation?