Promise of Open Hardware

A grand promise of open hardware became clear as open source hardware was born in 1997 - see the history on Wikipedia.

A promise was implied - most clearly perhaps by Reprap's founding statements or OSE's writings, that collaborative, open development can transform the world with democratized production. This term has been abused and never realized (as of 2023). Which would have profound implications on solving the last frontier of economics - that of Distribution. Implying ready solution of poverty, war, and hunger - any issues based on resource scarcity.

This never happened. The wealth gap has increased, and the democratic features of the current production system and the underlying technosphere are questionable at best. As 'resource scarcity' implies, 'abundance' is the solution. It's not a hippy ideal. It's a rigorous condition of responsibility and effective productivity that leaved nobody behind.

For OSE, this is still only the beginning. Stay tuned. Rome wasn't built in a day. Open hardware collaboration will not happen overnight - much rewiring of human minds towards abundance thinking has yet to happen. Because the process is hard - we would have to thoroughly rewire the operating system of humanity's scarcity-based economics. See my discussion on why this is hard, expressed in 2023 - [1]