open design

Do you remember HeathKit? The company that sold circuit board and resistor kits you could assemble to make your own electronics?

Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. And back in the day, a well-built HeathKit radio was every bit as good as the store-bought ones. » Read more

We've talked about open source cars before, but open source tractors? Marcin Jakubowski has helped to open the designs for 50 farm machines, including a design for a tractor that he was able to build in six days at a cost far less that of a manufactured tractor. By creating and sharing blueprints for open machines, we're seeing the foundation for open civilations. » Read more

This is an old story--two years old, to be specific. But it was new to me when I heard it at LinuxCon, and it was new to a lot of others in the room too. And it was a great story, so I wanted to share it further.

In 2008, the Dutch Ministry of Finance held a competition to design a coin that would honor the country's architecture.

To briefly describe the coin, on one side is a portrait of » Read more

Here at opensource.com, we aspire to take principles the open source software movement has applied to building better software faster and find more uses for them in business, education, government, the law, and generally in our lives. » Read more

Where does open design and sustainability meet Tide? The open washing machine project. » Read more

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about Apple and open innovation. The discussion in the comments about Apple's success, despite their non-openness, was pretty interesting. Greg DeKoenigsberg started things off with this salvo: » Read more

We could be closer to consumer options for open source cars than ever before. Which begs the question, could the recent floor mat entrapment and pedal recalls from Toyota be solved in a more open way? Or better yet, could they have been prevented if they were designed and built the open source way?
» Read more