Janet Hope’s PhD thesis on Open Source Biotechnology, also has an interesting summary of the arguments against the likelyhood of successfull open hardware projets.

Excerpts:

“Open hardware, like open source, has its share of ideologues and sceptics; here we are interested in the sceptics’ view. Sceptics of open hardware have made a number of points that could also potentially be applied to open source biotechnology. These are listed here in order to highlight some of the differences between software and biotechnology research tools with respect to the feasibility of open source development that may be associated with the non-digital nature of many biotechnology research tools.

The first point is that no generally accepted open hardware licences yet exist. As noted in an earlier section, copyleft licences (and other forms of open source software licence) rely on copyright: the copyright owner uses his or her exclusive rights to guarantee certain freedoms for users of the software program covered by the licence. However, as with biotechnology research tools, computer hardware is mostly protected by patent. In contrast to copyright protection, which is quick, cheap and simple, obtaining a patent is a costly, time-consuming process; moreover, maintaining a patent requires the payment of substantial renewal fees. (There may be other relevant differences between patent protection and copyright protection besides cost — if so, they will be explored as part of this project.) The costs of obtaining patent protection may make patent owners less willing than copyright owners to give up the income stream associated with standard proprietary licensing, and/or it may discourage otherwise willing contributors to an open source biotechnology project who are not in a position to obtain patent protection for their contributions. The question of how to translate open source licences into the context of patent protection (and other types of protection that may apply to biotechnology research tools) is an important one for open hardware, and also for open source biotechnology. Licensing experiments in the open hardware context continue: for example, the Indian Simputer is subject to a lawyer-drafted GPL-like licence.

The second point made by open hardware sceptics that may also apply to open source biotechnology is that hardware is not as modular and compartmentalised as software. Benkler has emphasised modularity as an important feature of successful open source projects, in particular in connection with contributors’ motivation. However, open hardware sceptics have raised a different point, which is that unless the technology itself is highly modular and compartmentalised, small changes to one part are likely to interact in unforeseen ways with the rest. Whether this is in fact a difference between software and hardware is not clear. However, the general point may be particularly relevant to biotechnology research tools, as many are living organisms or components of living organisms: unpredictable, delayed side-effects in response to apparently small changes are established characteristics of living organisms as a class of complex systems.

The third point is that capital costs associated with hardware manufacture are higher than for software, so that human creativity costs are a smaller proportion of the total costs in the hardware context. (As we saw earlier, Benkler suggests that the advantages of the peer production mode relative to other modes relate to information about and allocation of human creativity, and become salient when human creativity is a salient component of production.) Capital costs for hardware manufacture are higher than for software manufacture in relation to both development (for example, tools for developing, testing and debugging software are much cheaper and more easily made accessible — e.g. by Internet and open source software licensing, as many such tools are themselves software — than tools for developing hardware) and production (for example, silicon for making chips costs money). Open hardware sceptics have suggested that there are therefore minimal start-up costs for software programmers but not for hardware developers, and further, that resulting reliance on institutional funding for hardware manufacture makes the process more vulnerable to conservative institutional attitudes and employment-related legal constraints. (As noted in an earlier section, the latter problems may be partially solved by top-down influence on institutional thinking by, for example, funding agencies such as the NIH, and by direct participation in open source biotechnology projects by institutions or companies, as distinct from individual employees.)

A final point arising from skeptical writings on open hardware relates to motivation — not to contribute to a project, but to explore the concept itself and find ways to overcome obstacles. Richard Stallman has asserted that freedom to copy hardware is not as important as freedom to copy software because copying software is easy to do, whereas copying hardware is difficult.“