Open source hardware culture gaining popularity

In today’s world there are lots of things going on in the field of electronics and one of which picked up momentum globally, is popularity of open source hardware. The Engineers and Hackers around the globe are happy to buy such hardware and play with it. These hardware are best tool for Hacker to know how things work ? Beside of this, the corporate companies are also paid attention towards these hardware productions because of popularity among the people and extensive publicly open support forum.

What is open source hardware?

Open source hardware are typically comes with original design files that enable people to study them freely, make changes and share those changes with other people under some terms called Licenses e.g. GNU General Public License (GPL),  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license etc.

Why open source hardware?

Open source hardware offers relatively inexpensive alternative to their closed proprietary parts. There are several examples like Arduino Duemilanove, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone etc.  Lets take Arduino for this discussion, these board are part of a complete open source electronic prototyping platform including software development environment (JAVA based Arduino IDE). A complete Arduino system is made up of both open source software and hardware. The supporting software for Arduino board is free for download with code itself and also reference design file for hardware are also available under open source licensing terms. Using these resources people can easily build their own Arduino Duemilanove board by paying very little cost to buy spare parts.