2016
From Open Source Ecology's perspective, 2016 marks a turning point in the history of open source hardware development, when open source 3-dimenstional computer-aided design (CAD) for mechanical design widely accessible. Specifically, FreeCAD v0.16 has been released as a practical solution for 3D design, getting to a stable release that OSE still uses in 2022 (in addition to newer versions of FreeCAD). OSE has developed a Merge Workflow which relies on many people collaborating on Part Libraries generated in FreeCAD.
The significance of open source 3D technical CAD becoming widely available is that large-scale, collaborative design became possible.
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. This marked a turning point in history where collaborative creative work became possible for the first time - for unlimited numbers of people working in realtime on the same documents.
- ~2000 - invention of the wiki. Specifically - Ward Cunningham, 1995. This is the first time when an unlimited number of peopled were enabled to contribute to creative writing (for example, creation of an online encyclopedia - Wikipedia), though not entirely in realtime.
- 1991 - creation of Linux. The first time that collaborative tools were available for large-scale software collaboration (modular breakdown, mailing lists, version control leading to the creation of Git) which resulted in the creation of the most widely-adopted operating system in the world for computing devices.
- 1234 - invention of the printing press in Korea [1] Gutenberg popularized the printing press in the 1400s.
- 3400 BC - invention of writing in Mesopotamia [2]