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