Um, hello, welcome.
I was just going to kick this off
by saying big ups to Ayah and Alicia!
[applause]
OK, so, a really quick introduction.
I'm Limor Fried, I run Adafruit Industries
which is in downtown Manhatten
so I got to take the 7 here.
And um I've been doing open source hardware
and selling it as part of this business since 2006
and I've got really good news
all of you who've heard me talk
I'm actually not going to talk about my business.
Um, because Ayah and Alicia said
"hey we want, you know, pragmatic, hobbyist, you know, solutions-based driven stuff"
and I was like OK you know I'm not going to
talk about all the details of shipping, manufacturing
and licensing and all that stuff.
I'm actually going to talk about
"Why Do Open Source Hardware?"
and specifically why I did open source hardware
and ah, maybe some of the reasons why
you may want to do open source hardware
if you don't.
Um so OK, so we're going to rewind
back to 2002 and 2003
we're going to stop at 2006.
So it's all going to be history.
So, you know, I grew up in Boston and, uh,
Boston is a bit of a sea of you know, the FSF,
the EFF used to be there too.
So there was a lot of like, you know, Linux-y,
BSD people hanging out there
and I went to MIT.
So there was a culture of open source software.
So it was sort of assumed that if you were
going to work on something
it would be an open source software project,
you know install Linux, you were running it,
it was totally cool and Microsoft sucked.
And so when I started moving away from doing software
and doing more electronics
um, there were sort of
I had this uh you know core of like
"oh, open source software is good,
and I've seen the good it does."
And so I was definitely inspired by that.
So it's not like I came up with open source hardware
out of nowhere.
It's a derivative of open source software.
And uh what I would do
when I was learning electronics
is that I would release stuff
like these are some earlier projects that I did
some development boards and stuff
when I was in school
and I would release you know
they would have software and firmware
and I would release the software and firmware
under like GPL or MIT or BSD license or anything
or whatever the popular license of the time was.
But I would put the files up
and I would say just ah you know
"these are the Eagle CAD files
and the Grouper files
and I guess do what you want with them."
But like the idea that you could even license them
actually I had no idea
I didn't know about like mass works
or what was copyright or schematic copyright
or is it patented or what?
So I just put it up and I said
"you know, whatever, you can enjoy it yourself."
So for example
and I'm going to go through specific examples of projects
and why I open sourced them
or why I published them.