History of Open Source Hardware

Enlightenment - 2000

• 1997 - first notions of open hardware were born [1]

• Rise of Open Source Ecology, 2003.
• Rise of RepRap, 2004
• RIse of Arduino, 2005
• Rise of Makerbot - 2009
• Rise of Lulzbot - 2011
• Rise of Prusa Printers

Dark Ages - 2014-2022

• Enclosure of Makerbot - 2014
• Lulzbot distress sale, but the company survives - 2019
• Shuttleworth Foundation closes its door - 2022
• OSE does not scale to the billion dollar level as was implied a decade earlier with the Global Village Construction Set TED Talk.

The Coming of Christ (or whoever your hero may be)

• 2023 - OSE's conceptualization of Distributed Market Substitution to deliver the promise of open hardware via distributed production, and its first scalable experiment on the topic with the Seed Eco-Home, currently in the product release phase. The question we aim to answer: can open hardware bring about a revolution in the economic system, by addressing distribution of wealth in a significant way? That was the initial promise, from the counterculture to cyberculture - not yet delivered. RepRap, OSE, From Counterculture to Cyberculture - all still promise technoutopia, but in reality we are mired in democratic downsliding and war in 2023.