Why start-up should go for Open Source over Closed Source to develop their IoT

This has taken us a while to figure out whether to go with open source over closed source, like most of you we were afraid of losing Intellectual right on our hardware design and technology. After researching for a while, we have decided go with the open source development and our decision has proved to be the best decision for our start-up company. Therefore, through this blog we are sharing why you should also choose open source to develop your electronic and hardware models.

We assume that you are a maker of some kind, inventors, programmers, or designers. As a creative person, you may be torn between your own desire to learn how things work and modify or restore to re-use them but at the same time worry that your newly launched design can be copied by the other start-up or the large enterprises.

In fact, this tension between the closed and open approaches is rather interesting, especially when applied to a mix of software and hardware, as we find with Internet of Things devices. Well this was the question that we have been asking to our self. Let’s stay with us throughout this blog to find out why you must go with open source.

The Open Source Hardware Association

Alongside the emergence of the Internet of Things, a similar, if slightly more advanced, rise of the Maker movement has occurred. This hands-on approach to playing around with technology encourages passionate amateurs and professionals alike to break out the soldering iron and their toolkit and create everything from robots and 3D printers to interactive artworks and games. A heavy overlap exists between the Maker movement and hackspaces—the network of groups of like-minded individuals helping each other learn new skills and experiment with technology in novel ways. The democratic and open approach from hackspaces, along with that of the open source software community, has carried over into the Maker culture, resulting in a default stance of sharing designs and code. As the community has grown and matured, this sharing has coalesced into the more formal form of open hardware. In March 2010, at the Opening Hardware workshop, the participants started to define what open hardware is. Over the following 11 months, both online and at the first Open Hardware Summit, this definition was honed and refined into version 1.0 of the Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Statement of Principles and Definition (http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW), which was released in February 2011. Work on the definition is ongoing, and at the time of writing the draft for version 1.1 is a work in progress.

This definition is now accompanied by an Open Source Hardware logo, which designers can use on their products to indicate that the source files are available for learning, re-using, and extending into new products.

The Open Hardware Summit also established itself as a regular annual event, bringing together a huge number of hackers, makers, developers, and designers to discuss and celebrate open hardware each September. Finally, in June 2012, the Open Source Hardware Association (http://www.oshwa.org) was formally incorporated. As we write, the organisation is still finding its feet and working out exactly how to undertake its aims of supporting the Open Hardware Summit and educating the wider public on all matters pertaining to open source hardware. Products which conform to the aims of open source hardware can use the logo.

The OSHWA logo.

http://oshwlogo.com

WHY CLOSED?

Asserting Intellectual Property rights is often the default approach, especially for larger companies. If you declared copyright on some source code or a design, someone who wants to market the same project cannot do so by simply reading your instructions and following them. That person would have to instead reverse-engineer the functionality of the hardware and software. In addition, simply copying the design slavishly would also infringe copyright. You might also be able to protect distinctive elements of the visual design with trademarks and of the software and hardware with patents.

 Although getting good legal information on what to protect and how best to enforce those rights is hard and time-consuming, larger companies may well be geared up to take this route. If you are developing an Internet of Things device in such a context, working within the culture of the company may simply be easier, unless you are willing to try to persuade your management, marketing, and legal teams that they should try something different.

If you’re working on your own or in a small company, you might simply trademark your distinctive brand and rely on copyright to protect everything else. Note that starting a project as closed source doesn’t prevent you from later releasing it as open source You may have a strong emotional feeling about your Intellectual Property rights: especially if your creativity is what keeps you and your loved ones fed, this is entirely understandable. But it’s worth bearing in mind that, as always, there is a trade-off between how much the rights actually help towards this important goal and what the benefits of being more open are.

WHY OPEN?

In the open source model, you release the sources that you use to create the project to the whole world. You might publish the software code to GitHub  (http://github.com), the electronic schematics using Fritzing (http:// fritzing.org) or SolderPad (http://solderpad.com), and the design of the housing/shell to Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com). If you’re not used to this practice, it might seem crazy: why would you give away something that you care about, that you’re working hard to accomplish? There are several reasons to give away your work:

You are likely to gain positive comments from people who liked it.

It acts as a public showcase of your work, which may affect your reputation and lead to new opportunities.

People who used your work may suggest or implement features or fix bugs.

By generating early interest in your project, you may get support and mindshare of a quality that it would be hard to pay for.

Of course, this is also a gift economy: you can use other people’s free and open source contributions within your own project. Forums and chat channels exist all over the Internet, with people more or less freely discussing their projects because doing so helps with one or more of the benefits mentioned here. If you’re simply “scratching an itch” with a project, releasing it as open source may be the best thing you could do with it. A few words of encouragement from someone who liked your design and your blog post about it may be invaluable to get you moving when you have a tricky moment on it.

A bug fix from someone who tried using your code in a way you had never thought of may save you hours of unpleasant debugging later. And if you’re very lucky, you might become known as “that bubble machine guy” or get invited to conferences to talk about your LED circuit. If you have a serious work project, you may still find that open source is the right decision, at least for some of your work.

Disadvantages of Open Source The obvious disadvantage of open source “but people will steal my idea!”—may, in fact, be less of a problem than you might think. In general, if you talk to people about an idea, it’s hard enough to get them to listen because they are waiting to tell you about their great idea (the selfish cads). If people do use your open source contribution, they will most likely be using it in a way that interests them. The universe of ideas is still, fortunately, very large.

However, deciding to release as open source may take more resources. As the saying goes: the shoemaker’s children go barefoot. If you’re designing for other people, you have to make something of a high standard, but for yourself, you often might be tempted to cut corners.

When you have a working prototype, this should be a moment of celebration. Then having to go back and fix everything so that you can release it in a form that doesn’t make you ashamed will take time and resources. Of course, the right way to handle this process would be to start pushing everything to an open repository immediately and develop in public.

This is much more the “open source way”. It may take some time to get used to but may work for you. After you release something as open source, you may still have a perceived duty to maintain and support it, or at least to answer questions about it via email, forums, and chatrooms. Although you may not have paying customers, your users are a community that you may want to maintain. It is true that, if you have volunteered your work and time, you are entirely responsible for choosing to limit that whenever you want. But abandoning some-thing before you’ve built up a community around it to pass the reins to cannot be classed as a successful open source project.

Open Source as a Competitive Advantage Although you might be tempted to be very misty-eyed about open source as a community of good citizens and a gift economy, it’s important to understand.

The possibility of using it to competitive advantage. First, using open source work is often a no-risk way of getting software that has been tested, improved, and debugged by many eyes. As long as it isn’t licensed with an extreme viral license (such as the AGPL), you really have no reason not to use such work, even in a closed source project. Sure, you could build your own microcontroller from parts and write your own library to control servo motors, your own HTTP stack, and a web framework. Or you could use an Arduino, the Arduino servo libraries and Ethernet stack, and Ruby on Rails, for example. Commercial equivalents may be available for all these examples, but then you have to factor in the cost and rely on a single company’s support forums instead of all the information available on the

Internet. Second, using open source aggressively gives your product the chance to gain mindshare. In this book we talk a lot about the Arduino—as you have seen in this chapter; one could easily argue that it isn’t the most powerful platform ever and will surely be improved. It scores many points on grounds of cost but even more so on mindshare. The design is open; therefore, many other companies have produced clones of the board or components such as shields that are compatible with it. This has led to amusing things such as the Arduino header layout “bug” (http://forum.arduino.cc/index. php/topic, 22737.0.html#subject_171839), which is the result of a design mistake that has nevertheless been replicated by other manufacturers to target the same community.

If an open source project is good enough and gets word out quickly and appealingly, it can much more easily gain the goodwill and enthusiasm to become a platform. The “geek” community often choose a product because, rather than being a commercial “black box”, it, for example, exposes a Linux shell or can communicate using an open protocol such as XML. This community can be your biggest ally. Open Source as a Strategic Weapon One step further in the idea of open source used aggressively is the idea of businesses using open source strategically to further their interests (and undermine their competitors).

 In “Commoditizing your complements”(http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html), software entrepreneur Joel Sapolsky argues that many companies that invest heavily in open source projects are doing just that. In economics, the concept of complements defines products and services that are bought in conjunction with your product—for example, DVDs and DVD players. If the price of one of those goods goes down, then demand for both goods is likely to rise. Companies can therefore use improvements in open source versions of complementary products to increase demand for their products. If you manufacture microcontrollers, for example, then improving the open source software frameworks that run on the microcontrollers can help you sell more chips.

While open sourcing your core business would be risky indeed, trying to standardize things that you use but which are core to your competitor’s business may, in fact, help to undermine that competitor. So, Google releasing Android as open source could undermine Apple’s iOS platform.  Facebook releasing Open Compute, to help efficiently maintain large data centers, undermines Google’s competitive advantage. Facebook clearly needs efficient data centers. So, to open source its code gives the company the opportunity to gain contributions from many clever open source programmers. But it gives nothing away about Facebook’s core algorithms in social graphing.  This dynamic is fascinating with the Internet of Things because several components in different spaces interact to form the final product: the physical design, the electronic components, the micro-controller, the exchange with the Internet, and the back-end APIs and applications. This is one reason why many people are trying to become leaders in the middle ware layers, such as Xively (free for developers, but not currently open source, though many non-core features are open). While you are prototyping, these considerations are secondary, but being aware of these issues is worthwhile so that you understand the risks and opportunities involved.

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