Open Hardware Journal

Bruce Perens writes "Open Hardware Journal is a new technical journal on designs for physical or electronic objects that are shared as if they were Open Source software. It's an open journal under a Creative Commons license. The first issue contains articles on 'Producing Lenses With 3D Printers,' 'Teaching with Open Hardware Submarines,' 'An Open Hardware Platform for USB Firmware Updates and General USB Development,' and more." Mr. Perens has promised to be around tonight to answer any questions readers might have.

I'm here

[Bruce Perens]

I'm playing editor for Open Hardware Journal. I'll be in and out this evening, and will be able to answer questions from Slashdotters, maybe with some delay.

Re:I'm here

[Bruce Perens]

eBooks and tablets are a relatively new phenomenon, but lots of folks have them. PDF works well offline, for these devices, and is well-supported by Free Software as well. I haven't learned the specialized eBook file formats yet.

I tried this on a blog a while back, that is part of what technocrat.net was supposed to be for. What I found was that I was talking with the same 30 people all of the time. And there were maybe 3000 to 5000 regular readers at best.

There's also differentiation - I don't want this to be "just another blog".

And it seems that there is a history for technical journals being in print, and a more recent history of them being open publication. So, I am trying to do something that people who submit papers, and their bosses are used to. I have sometimes, working in academia, been asked to produce a list of my own publications. They seem to take the journal stuff more seriously than the blog stuff.

Re:I'm here

[Bruce Perens]

Sure. Someone, I know, has been working on Open designs for the 50 basic tools for civilization - tractors and plows and stuff. As long as the plans for them are under an Open Hardware license, we're interested in papers about them.

Re:Licensing - copyleft?

[Bruce Perens]

I like The TAPR Open Hardware License [tapr.org]. But yes, there is a problem that Hardware Isn't Generally Copyrightable [openhardware.org]. We can deal with the problem by using contract law, sometimes, and imperfectly, and by embedding copyrightable and trademarked content. I have a proposal for this that I've not finished yet, I'll try to get it up on the Open Hardware wiki soon.

Re:Licensing - copyleft?

[AndreyFilippov]

We at Elphel are now using the new CERN OHL ( http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cernohl/wiki [ohwr.org] ) and believe it is the closest to GNU GPL we are using fro the sofware

Re:LibreOffice

[Christopher_Olah]

Hey, I'm the author to the article "Producing Lenses With 3D Printers". It was originally in LaTeX and I think it looked a lot better that way. You can get the original PDF of it here [wordpress.com] .

I'd be happy to answer any questions about it, surfcad [wordpress.com], ImplicitCAD [github.com], Malthus [wordpress.com], 3D printed vacuum cleaners [wordpress.com], or any questions about my projects or 3D printing in general.

(Essentially resubmitting my previous anonymous comment since I reset the login for this account and no one sees Anonymous Coward posts.)