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.