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. The current OSE proposal is collaborative, open economics - with bootstrapped economic power so that open hardware can scale everywhere in the world as the next chapter in human history. OSE aims to demostrate that open, collaborative hardware development and standards - a diffiult proposition - can save humanity from being relegated to a permanence of proprietary development. Jesus reportedly proposed that there is enough for everyone, OSE aims to deliver this promise. Not via happy hippy hypotheses, but by the rigors of efficient production - distributed throughout the world for Mutually Assured Abundance - and responsibility for the world around us, in all of its dimensions. As a solution to wars like in the Ukraine, and as a solution for much centralized production coming from China. This is holy war without the accompanying jihad.