Peer2Politics

Open source hardware has truly changed my life. It allowed me to launch my own business. "How so," you might ask? Well, let's take a little stroll down memory lane, shall we?

File this under your ‘reasons to get a CNC machine in the near future’ if you don’t already have access to one. OpenDesk is the new open source furniture design resource from the team behind FabHub that aims to explore new models for open and collaborative design of digitally fabricated free modern furniture designs that can be made locally either by you or a local Maker.

This is the meat of my talk, but basically, the organization is flat and open. People join in on projects based on interest and available time, or start their own projects based on an idea and the ability to convince a couple coworkers that it's a worthwhile effort. If you have an idea for improvement, talk is cheap and putting in the code to demonstrate its potential is preferred. It's a very exciting way to choose direction and participation and lets everyone engage based on their interests and skill set. And nearly everything we write, anything that's easily reusable by someone else, is completely open source.

Wired's Chris Anderson demonstrates how to create autonomous quadcopter drones with an open source Arduino-compatible flight controller.

There are many useful open-source technologies out there. With all of this competition, it's critical to make it clear why your particular open-source offering should be considered, and for which needs. That's the reality any builder of an open-source community needs to adopt right from the start: While participation by developers in an active, viable open-source community will undoubtedly improve their projects, as well as your product's evolution, getting a community up and running can be a challenge.

The GitHub platform itself provides the open platform for this collaborative style.

It's his job to knock down the barriers between Facebook's engineers and the collective wisdom of the rest of the world.

Remember how the open source software movement was supposed to be like Woodstock, with everybody sharing and everything free? An entire economy where you gave a little to get a lot, in a place of love and software?

Yet, if anything, the global IT community may have ultimately learned more about community contribution models and commercial open source support than anything else.

Increasingly, software isn't sold, it's used to power services offered over the Internet. So why contend with the complexities of open source licensing?

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.