I discovered this older article by Terry Hancock, but find that it is still an excellent overview on the issues surrounding the possibility of free hardware development.
Article. Towards a Free Matter Economy. (pdf) By Terry Hancock. Free Software Magazine, Issue 7, October 2005.
Some excerpts by Terry Hancock:
“Material products are getting “smarter” in that more and more of the value of a material product is contained in the information it carries, rather than in its material substance. R. Buckminster Fuller called this process “ephemeralization”, and it is one means by which the economics of matter — predicated on the conservations of mass and number — are becoming sidelined by the properties of information. Furthermore, both the capital and marginal cost of making products has trended consistently and rapidly down as manufacturing tools become both cheaper and more versatile, so that the capital cost of an object is increasingly not in the capital equipment required to manufacture it, but in the effort required to design it.
The business model of masquerading an information product as a matter product — by legally controlling the “uncomfortable” property of free replication — has been remarkably successful for a very long time. This suggests that we should consider whether the converse is possible: can matter-based products be masqueraded to act more like information products — eliminating (or hiding) the uncomfortable property of costly replication ? In other words, can we create a bazaar for free-licensed hardware design information and a matter product manufacturing economy which supports it? And can we do it without poisoning the free-design process itself? If so, we might be able to port the high utility, rate of innovation, and low costs found in the free software community to community-based hardware projects—an extremely attractive possibility.”
What is required to make free hardware development possible?
Hardware design will require the construction of prototypes, experimental apparatus, testing services, and manufacturing expenses
“hardware is going to present special challenges, since hardware design will require the construction of prototypes, experimental apparatus, testing services, and manufacturing expenses. So, the most serious obstacle to overcome is payment for costs without interference with the interest-motivation of developers:
* A means must be found to offset the materials and manufacturing costs associated with free-licensed hardware prototypes, experimental apparatus, and finally, manufacturing cost.
Other requirements for success include the maintenance of a healthy effective bazaar size. This can be a problem for the much smaller hardware developer communities, largely due to a lack of exposure to the tools for manufacturing and design, and there are four strategies that can be used to solve this part of the problem:
* Make the bazaar more efficient at attracting, retaining, and collecting contributions from developers. This makes a larger bazaar size, despite a smaller community. Essentially, it must be easier to contribute.
* Make development reduce loss by more efficient and complete archiving, and above all, usefully cataloging archived data so that it can be efficiently retrieved when needed.
* Make more and better collaborative design tools available to the users as free software so that more would-be developers have access to them, and are made aware of the benefits of free-licensing.
* Actively train users on the tools and methods needed to become an effective developer — encourage growth in the community by turning more users and other interested parties into developers. This can only be pursued by active contributions.”
Hardware is never totally free
Just as free programs need free libraries, free machines need free electronics and ultimately free components.
“Almost no piece of hardware is totally “free”, because it invariably uses proprietary products at some depth. With software, a hard legal line can be drawn, but hardware introduces a fuzzy area that needs to be understood and controlled. As Figure 2 attempts to show, we have many different layers to consider: Program, Firmware, PAL devices, PCB design, Core-level, Chip-level, and even discrete component level. It’s less of a problem for mechanical designs, but electromechanical components are frequently single-source, and it may therefore be difficult to replace them in the future. All of which argues for the importance of commoditized subsystems to support top-level free designs.”
Necessary Localisation or In Situ Resource Utilization
“In a free matter economy, free-design data is produced in the same way as free software is today, and the manufacturing process is managed by the end user. That either means building it yourself, or contracting a manufacturing service provider to do it for you. But either way, the manufacturing process is decentralized and localized near the end-user.
This is driven by the market forces described in this series, but there is another reason for it: in the future, transportation costs will be a much bigger factor.”