2016

From Open Source Ecology's perspective, 2016 marks a turning point in the history of open source hardware development, when collaborative mechanical design CAD tools became refined to the point of usability in advanced mechanical design. Specifically, FreeCAD v0.16 has been released as a practical solution for 3D design. OSE has developed a Merge Workflow which relies on many people collaborating on Part Libraries generated in FreeCAD.

Because of the importance of physical infrastructures for sustaining life (ie, hardware - and specifically open hardware), this turning point is comparable in importance to:

• 2010 - invention of realtime, cloud, collaborative documents for text and graphics by Google
• ~2000 - invention of the wiki. Specifically - Ward Cunningham, 1995.
• 1991 - creation of Linux
• 1234 - invention of the printing press in Korea [1]
• 3400 BC - invention of writing in Mesopotamia [2]