hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1653.txt

Episode: 1653
Title: HPR1653: Ruth Suehle at Ohio Linux Fest 2014
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1653/hpr1653.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:25:16

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It's Wednesday 3 December 2014.
This is HPR Episode 1653 entitled Ruth Suho at Ohio Linux Fest 2014.
It is hosted by Ahaka and is about 46 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to swilnik at swilnik.com or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is Ruth Suho reminds us all that hardware needs to be open to.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthos.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15 that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthos.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ruth Schuhl, keynote speaker for Ohio 2014 Linux Fest.
Her topic, the Maker Community, default to open.
First of all, I apologize for my voice, I'm kind of a bit of a cold, so if at some point you can't hear me, just make the universal sign for I can't hear you, which I leave this.
And I will attempt to muster more sound.
As Van said, I worked for Red Hat.
I joined about seven years ago and initially worked on the brand team for the last few years.
I've been a part of a new recruit called Open Source and Standards, which is the part of Red Hat that helps our upstream communities
that are so important to Red Hat success.
We helped them be successful as well.
Of course, all of that is only tangentially related to Baker.
So, like Van said, I co-authored a book on Raspberry Pi and O'Reilly was nice enough to send me, I think, 15 or 20 copies.
So, after the second keynote, if you would like one, and there are only 15 to 20 of you who want one, come see me over here and give you a copy.
I also wrote Open Source.com.
As he mentioned, not as much as I used to do something over a years ago.
If you were here, no number of years ago, I used to give talks on Open Source.com.
And I'm a senior editor at a site called Keep Mom, where it's exactly what you think it is.
I talk about Star Trek and nerdy things and being a mom.
Not necessarily the same thing, so next.
But most importantly, as relates to this talk, I'm also a Baker of things.
I make lots of things.
My first instinct when I see something is, how can I make that thing?
Not how can I buy that thing?
If I can.
So, sculpt it, frost it, bake it, solder it, crochet it, in it, rivet it, I glue it.
I'm probably going to try to make it.
If I don't already know how to do it, I'm going to figure it out.
And when I try to find pictures to demonstrate this, I realize that I only make things that I can wear or eat.
I'm kind of okay with that.
Those of you who are hungry or whistle recognize what happens when your yeast works really well.
It turns out that it's kind of like a cupcake.
And I thought my open source work wasn't really related to makers.
And that's true on a fine granular sense.
We work with communities like RDO and Over and Gluster.
And those things aren't necessarily really that related to makers.
But on a grander scale, open source isn't very much important to the maker community.
Or at least I think it should be.
And that's what this talk is about.
So presumably since you're all here, you already all know what open source is.
Or if you didn't this morning, you do now.
So let's talk about what a maker is.
Instead of a love-hate relationship with this word.
I love it because it's very definitive.
It tells you quite succinctly what it is.
One who makes.
The problem I have with the word is because it gives people sort of,
they go to certain things like maybe the magazine.
Or they think a maker is somebody who plays with Artemino's and LEDs and makes things blink.
You can make things that don't blink.
It's true.
They think of 3D printers.
They think of these very narrow fields of making.
But reality, a maker is someone who makes.
It is simply about what you have made.
And it doesn't matter if it's good to you, if it's good to anyone else.
What is important is that you have created.
If it's a bucket of sand that you turn upside down and call to sandcastle, you are a maker.
And when I look about this other sandcastle, as it says anything once,
which like I said, is basically by a maker philosophy.
I will make anything absolutely once.
And then I make, oh, that was a dumb idea.
I've never do it that again.
We as humans are makers.
It is absolutely intrinsic to our nature.
It is part of who we are.
But there's this path that many of us take as individuals over our lives.
That I think mirrors our behavior as a species over the last tens of thousands of years or so.
So we're going to go back through the history of humans creating.
Anthropologically speaking, we largely recognize humans to hook the gun when we started making tools, sticks and stones.
But lots of other creatures use tools as well.
And so humans are specifically defined as creatures who use tools to make other tools.
And so then we mark the beginning of the stone age by when Fred Flintstone had been at the early game.
Yeah, I just wanted for those of you who've placed over in history class,
so I want to make sure you come along with me.
It's going to get good.
The stone age is marked by the beginning of stone tools, which was about two and a half million years ago.
These tools changed our existence to our very certifiable.
Up until then, a lot of our food that wasn't gathered,
the meat sort of food, was whatever other creatures had left behind.
Because we didn't have the ability to throw a spear at something far away,
or to rip into something with really tough flesh with our teeth.
And so stone tools gave us independence, which is really important later as I talk about what the maker movement is.
Shortly thereafter, we developed a taste for not just the function of things, but for the aesthetic.
We discovered art.
So archaeologists argue that there's art as much as 100,000 years ago,
and paleolyolithic era.
And so much like you did when you were five years old,
we started by painting our hands on cave walls.
Put your hand up there and blow some dust,
and that's why they're all in relief.
This is quite a bit of this monos and Argentina.
This is actually only about 10 to 12,000 years old.
And it came better cave art, and drawings, and sculpture,
and the Bradshaw paintings in Australia,
and the wonder work in cravings in Africa,
and Patrick Lips and Dr. Monica,
we see this all over the world, where ever humans were arising,
there was art, and there were tools, and there were creation.
They were makers.
Then with metal tools, we developed agriculture, and machines,
and ever more complicated machines,
that did ever more complicated tasks,
taking us to the furthest reaches of the earth,
and eventually often the earth, up towards the stars.
And so there's a little bit of sweet note in here,
and then the picture I chose for the space shuttle
is one I took from the launch of STS-135,
which is the final shuttle mission.
But what's important is that we went from this to this,
all from the same innate spirit to make,
from the same fundamental part of what makes us human.
But in order for any of that to happen,
we didn't have to just be makers.
We also had to be sharers.
Creatures who were willing to tell one another what we had discovered,
what we had made, and how to do it,
how to turn a stick into a spear,
or how to look pigment around your hands,
make an impression on the wall.
And in summer, along the way,
we developed a bit of a sense of possessiveness.
And I like to imagine this,
this is these are my friends, Og and Grog,
who I like to talk about, they're my caveman friends,
because they don't have an actual anthropological evidence
for this, I just like to imagine that one day,
Og came along and said,
hmm, Grog, how you make that hop fit,
and Og said, hmm, go get your own lagging ball.
And then I liked to assume that they were actually
really good friends until Og may be bacon
and wouldn't tell Grog, or it came from.
Let's hop back in our timeline and talk about how
that whole sharing thing got derailed by something
besides bacon, as delicious as this is.
We fast forward to about 500 BC in Greece.
There was an area called Ciberus,
and you can see that it turned out really well for them,
because this is about all this left.
They invented patents on luxury,
and the Ciberites and I didn't have one thing in common.
They considered luxury, delicious food.
And so you were awarded a patent on any particularly innovative
culinary delight that you could come up with.
You got the profits solely for a single year.
And they actually became well known for this,
and so now the English word,
Ciberite, Ciberite basically mean
opulent luxury and fantasticness of this sort.
In the Roman Empire,
Blacksmiths literally used trademarks,
marks of their trade to mark the things that they had made.
Some anthropologists also argued that they created
sort of a precursor to trade secrets,
because of the simple concept,
if what happens if I own a slave,
who then learns all of the things about my business,
and I sell him,
and he takes that knowledge with him.
We did assume the first copyright battle
to have taken place a couple hundred more years later.
There was this fantastic man named St. Pholomba,
who was an Irish-Gaelic missionary,
and he and a number of other apostles
looked with a guy named St. Vinyan,
which always going along swimmingly until one day,
when St. Vinyan learned what Pholomba was doing,
which was copy of his books.
This is what Pholomba is historically known for.
He spent his entire life day and night up until the minute he died,
painstakingly handcuffing books,
because they didn't have file shares.
So, that one day,
if Phinyan discovers that Pholomba has taken
a particular book from his library,
copied it, he goes,
that's not cool,
so that copy you made,
that belongs to me,
because that was my book,
and so the copy of it, that is also my book.
Phinyan basically declared an illegal copy,
and he went to the king.
The king, despite being Pholomba's cousin,
rolled Phinyan's favor and famously said,
to every cow belongs its calf,
to every book its copy,
and Irish Gaelic is really hard to pronounce,
and so I call him King Copyright,
but Copyrighterson.
And then there was a battle in a place
that I also could not pronounce,
because Irish Gaelic,
but other people called the battle of the book
for obvious reasons,
which resulted in the death of 3,000 people,
and Columbus Exile,
over one book getting copied.
In less deadly news,
unless they were actually using Silesons,
in 1266, the English parliament declared that all bakers
had to mark their bread
with their company name, basically,
and because I had no pictures of bread
from 1266 England,
I went with Sileson Toast.
I don't also think about food,
I also like beer,
and Lowen Brow has essentially the oldest trademark
they've been using some virgin of his lines since 1383.
And then the first true patents were granted
in 15th century Italy for glass makers and thinnest,
and then England caught on to the idea
of patents as a way to theoretically encourage
innovation,
but in reality,
it became a way to encourage but not least.
And that's pretty much instantly
they invented patent abuse,
and about five minutes later,
patent floor.
1710 is the Statute of Am,
which is pretty well recognized as
the first real modern copyright act,
and then trade secret law came into existence in England
in the US in the early 1800s,
and that fast forward had to bring this up
to what we recognize as relatively modern times,
and you all know that pretty well
because you've had the internet.
So let's reflect on that,
zip zip through history that we took from sharing
in order to eat and survive to this exploding system
of protecting and mind, mind, mind,
and think about it on the scale of one person's life.
When you were a child,
pretty much the first thing that you're taught,
besides potty training,
is to share.
Your parents tell you to share.
Share with your brothers and sisters.
Share that cookie, share that toy.
Share with your friends.
But there's for some reason all the adults
teaching that lesson seem to have completely forgotten
at themselves.
They somewhere along the way simply stop sharing.
They want longer copyright terms,
and more patents awarded,
and you want shrouds,
and secrecy,
and all of this protection of their creations
instead of sharing them.
In the end, we're no different from Ogg and Grog.
Eventually, we're both going to make the fire,
and one day the fire is going to take us to the moon.
But it happens so much faster,
and so much better,
and so much more successfully,
if they did it together.
Likewise, Grog eventually is going to share
this discovery of how to sharpen a spear
together.
They're going to have five broader roots to earn.
But we've spent centuries trying to squirm away
our secrets instead of sharing them,
to hold our creations until we believe
there is a state to be shared,
which in reality probably means
in a state that they're very difficult to copy.
It's this idea,
ooh, what if I catch a disappeared?
I'm sorry, it's actually a really good picture
of a traffic sign that says secret bunker that way.
We've been in this concept of luxury brands
and a need for them.
We've been in the culture of consuming and disposing,
and I don't know what happened to my images of very sorry,
instead of creating and rebuilding,
we're disposing.
So the maker movement is the slice of humanity
that set it enough.
We're done with that.
We want to be able to rebuild and reuse
and create our own things
and build a better society off of it.
It's these people who have recognized that need
within themselves and within others to create and to share.
And so the next thing I want to talk about
is Maker Affairs,
which this is a picture from one of the world Maker Affairs,
and it was incredibly hard to pick a picture to use for this,
because I love everything that happens at Maker Affairs,
and it's also different.
It's like trying to pick your favorite child.
It's not okay.
And so I went with the maker robot
as kind of their emblem in the shop block,
because I have shop bought jealousy.
So it's labeled the greatest show in tell on Earth,
and Maker Affairs are designed to be a place
where Maker share their creations,
get ideas from one another, thrive together.
But of course, people didn't just start creating
and making things with somebody's laptop
or make on a dail door or you'd be specific,
and started printing a magazine about it.
That wasn't how obviously we have always been making.
There have always been crafters and creators and tinkers.
It's simply what we did.
You made your clothes,
because that's how you got your clothes,
and you fixed your television when it broke,
because you fixed your television when it broke.
That's what people did.
But it's also because you could.
It's because the parts were available to do so.
It's because you have that option.
As a seamstress, let me tell you,
there were a lot more fabric stores even 20 or 30 years ago,
and now I'm down to a really terrible joyance,
where there's a two hour way to the cutting table
with really surly women.
I don't recommend it.
So we increasingly closed up things
that made it more difficult to do yourself,
until we arrived at this.
And it will eventually in this talk sound like
I am the world's biggest iPhone hater,
but the reality is just this easy and convenient representation
of what we've become as a culture
and what we've done to devices.
It's the seemingly ubiquitous device
that you cannot so much change the battery in yourself.
If I can tell my parents in, like, say, 1998 or so,
that I wanted this thing even, you know,
even as late as 1988, 88,
whatever you were a kid, mom,
I'd like you to buy me this thing
that I'm going to use every day,
and that's eventually it's going to have problems,
but you can't change the batteries.
Your mother would have told you you were insane.
She would have told you to go buy a Tamagotchi
and have fun with it.
This is a book that I really like.
It's called Vintage Tomorrow.
It's published by O'Reilly.
It connects this desire to make things
with the steampunk movement.
And initially it's like, yeah,
what does that have to do with one another?
But the two people who wrote it,
it's a futurist and a historian.
And they've recognized that this whole steampunk thing
kind of became popular about the same time
this whole maker thing became popular.
And so steampunk is a modern tape
on usually Victorian times.
You can kind of boil it down to basically
thinking of modern technology,
but if it were still powered by steam,
if we never would have passed that.
Steampunkers are frequently makers.
I'm not sure I remember that one who wasn't.
They have this desire to create and to make.
There's a huge crossover.
And so the book describes the simultaneous arrival
as connected through this common desire
to return to a time when we did these things for ourselves,
when we were makers.
And so steampunk is this previous time
and it all works out.
And so the common thread is what we want to learn
to go back to this time,
would be make things which we no longer do,
as reflected in the make motto.
If you can't open it, you don't own it.
Which makes it seem like by their nature
the maker movement would be opened by default.
But what I have learned is that it is really really not
and sort of disappointingly so.
No one is intentionally sharing
or intentionally creating derivative works
and building on one another.
The truth is, it's quite the opposite.
And I'm afraid growing in the wrong direction.
And so that's what I want all of you to take away from this
is that you can go out and help change that
the way it should be going,
to help makers become more open.
So because the maker movement makes you think of
Artymato's obligy things in 3D printers,
we're going to use a third example
and look at the open hardware movement.
Which again, by its name,
sounds like it's opened by default.
And I don't want to disintegrate them
because these are fantastic people
and the open hardware definition
had a lot of work go into it.
But I first attended the open hardware summit
in person.
They stream the whole thing online.
It's not a conference like this.
It's just one stage and talks go across all day.
At first, when in 2012,
largely as a writer for OpenSource.com,
I thought it sounded really interesting.
I thought there was going to be a lot that would be relevant to us.
They had a super awesome studio with 11 years old Ben.
She's the kid who has her own maker webcast on YouTube.
There was a 77-year-old named Pat Delaney
who made a late slash mill slash drill out of scrap metal
for $150.
And said, here's how you can do it.
So I was interested in all these projects.
I thought there would be a lot of cross-over
with OpenSource software.
And then I came back.
And this is the headline I wrote.
And that was pretty much the optimistic version.
This was the most promising headline I could write
about what I had experienced.
It wasn't a culture of open by default,
but open by accident.
Essentially, people who came,
they grew up with the internet.
And so they said, I'm going to put my thing online
because that's kind of what you do.
But then you meet OpenSource to them.
It didn't meet OpenSource.
It was just, I just kind of showed what I did.
The open keynote was by Chris Anderson,
who was at the time editor in Chief of Wire magazine.
And this was his opening sentence
for the beginning of OpenHardware Summit.
Everything I've learned as I built my own business
is because people share what they do.
But then he went on to talk about the limitations
of OpenHardware.
And he finally said that the solution is alternative.
Like maybe a conditional license
with restrictions on commercial views
or only releasing the schematics
or having open software on closed hardware.
And finally, he said, I don't think
we should be dogmatic about this.
We need to consider other possibilities
and approaches to open-based innovation.
Not open innovation.
Somewhere along the afternoon on this schedule
was Brie Penis, who you may recognize
as the founder of MakerBot Industries,
the MakerBot 3D printer.
The reason it was really interesting that day
was because it was about three days after MakerBot announced
that the replicator 2 would not be open.
The reason that is interesting
is because Brie had spent several of the previous years
giving interviews like the one on the left
in which he talked about how critical it was to be open.
If you can't see that in the back, he says in the future,
people will remember businesses
that refused to share with their customers
and wonder how they could be so backwards.
And then two years later,
when people had cloned to the MakerBot,
he said, you know what?
We decided we were not really okay with that.
And so we're closing it up.
For presenters and attendees,
I kept hearing the same sorts of stories
that opened by accident,
rather than it opened intentionally,
opened by default.
I saw almost no limits.
There was all windows, mostly backs.
And several of the first open-hardware summits
were held right before New York MakerFair.
And so then I would go to MakerFair.
And it was about the same time
that I started presenting projects and presenting as a speaker
at the World MakerFair and at local many MakerFairs.
And so I got into this habit of walking around
to the other makers at the MakerFairs
and asking some simple questions.
Things like, is this open-hardware?
Are your plans online?
Have you shared this anywhere?
Is there anything open about this?
I don't think I've ever asked quite that
like thing.
It depends on the project.
And over the last few years,
I feel like there's been a subtle but important change
from the greatest show and teller
to the greatest show and seller.
And I don't mean to say,
I just like MakerFairs anymore.
I love them.
I think they're an important thing,
but I also really believe that they should go back
to something more like what they were several years ago.
Every time I would ask,
is this open-hardware?
Does it use open-hardware?
Is there anything open about this?
The answer would be,
I can sell you one.
And the sponsors at MakerFair
have started to change, too.
And I don't have a problem with sponsors.
There's a conference planner and a conference attendee.
I understand sponsors are critical to your existence.
But there's a big difference between desks,
which is the radio shock,
Shaq learned a solder booth.
And really, like,
who in here thought radio shock was still relevant?
And yet, some of them actually are doing a really good job
in this Arduino maker space.
Some of them are just self-unstores.
But radio shock would sponsor
this learn to solder booth
and teach you to make a little,
a little blinking thing,
because things blink.
SparkFair is another MakerFair sponsor,
who, this is another learn to solder booth,
but SparkFair does a lot of events
and teaches you to make things blink.
It's true.
Everything.
But there's a big difference between these types of sponsors
and the one that almost single-handedly set me down
this line of thinking of what happened to MakerFair.
And I couldn't even find a picture of it online,
which I think suggests that it was bad and embarrassing.
So I had to use their press release.
There was a massive purine booth,
which apparently elevated the DNA experience
for all the caps at MakerFair.
Good job, Purina.
And your sour cream container
with a whole sponge penit,
which seems to be making things.
No.
This is what I mean by the changing face
of what's happening in the MakerFair.
But all of that is the downside.
So let's go back to why all this matters.
So we see why it's important to encourage
the Maker community towards openness.
And as all of us are believers
in the open source software
and in the importance of it,
it's easy for us to forget why it's important.
Because we spend a lot of time just knowing that it is
and assuming that it is.
And we don't spend a lot of time thinking about why anymore.
So why does it matter
if Maker share what they create?
Here's my Maker friends.
He's today's Maker.
And that means he's the inventor of tomorrow's device.
He makes this thing.
It might be a toy or an article clothing.
Or it might be something really important.
Something that saves someone's life
or changes a lot of lives for the better.
And so if someone comes along and finds that device
and learns more about it.
And maybe all she can do is change the batteries.
And that's good.
But maybe she makes it into something better.
And that means that she's the next Maker.
And it's a cycle.
And it continues.
And this is a cycle that can't happen
if any of those pieces breaks.
It causes problems that similar to the situation
are familiar with in software.
Things like security flaws.
Whether it's in software or hardware.
Openness means audit.
It means better software for everyone.
We've seen what happens with DRM.
And then over the last year,
we've heard more and more about insecurity
and networking and other hardware.
Even in New York times, not bad.
Which is what this is from.
Pointed to open hardware as a key
for a more secure internet.
And so those of you who are a little bit older
can think about what it means that even the New York Times
has printed open hardware as the key to a secure internet.
And how crazy that might have sounded even 10 years ago.
Closing up things also leads to expensive repairs
and repair contracts instead of empowering you
to fix things yourself.
So it turns out a third of iPhone users damaged their device,
which I think is supported by the number of people
I see typing on crap screens like that one.
In the iPhone 4, repair required 27 screws
and three layers of separation and a whole other time.
In the iPhone 5, it was five screws and two layers.
This sounds like an improvement.
Except then, to get this independently repaired,
the cost increased a whole lot.
And so a lot of this independent vendors
from the iPhone 5 came along and said,
not doing the repairs.
You can just take your little self over the apple.
It's going to cost you a lot less than a lot less heartache for me.
And of course, then to do it yourself with instructions on YouTube
it costs about 25 bucks.
But I'm pretty sure Apple's still a lot of Apple
care off this situation.
But it's not just iPhones.
It's repairs in general.
Repair shops are going out of business.
True repair shops.
TV repair shops.
Like, how many of you even remember a TV repairman existing
in your neighborhood?
I mean, I'm 36.
I don't remember ever actually having a pen to one to be honest.
Now we just pause it and get a new way.
And that leads to piles and piles of e-waste.
So much e-waste.
Which is not just a pile of crap,
but it's actually got a lot of dangerous chemicals in it.
The U.S. alone has gone from producing 2 million tons of e-waste
in 2005 to 9 million in 2012.
And it's just going up from there.
These are the average life spans of those devices in the U.S.
And it's generated not only because people want to do a shiny thing,
but because the devices have become difficult to repair or to upgrade.
But it's not just about these disadvantages to closing.
It's also about the advantages to being open from the beginning.
Now, makers definitely skew towards a younger generation.
Which is not to say that there are plenty of makers on every demographic,
but there's definitely this group that has grown up at the Internet.
And like I said, all of those people who were an open hardware summit
share it because the Internet was there.
And that was just kind of what they'd always done.
It was tell people on the Internet what they had done.
They have this secondary problem.
And it comes from that innate desire to be a maker.
And that is that.
There are accomplishments now that have become largely virtual.
And it requires at least a phone and probably an Internet connection
to show you this cool app I made or this website that I made.
And so there's this growing desire to have created something tangible
besides a simmer camel.
And thus sprung up websites like intractable Omar.
Well, that's special.
Do I get it back?
I don't get it back.
Oh, no!
Okay.
Well, I'm just going to relaunch across to keep talking to you about the website.
How many of you have been to a website like Instructables or Thingiverse or Ravelry or
what's happening on the side of the room?
Like, there's a large chunk of people that are making nothing.
Nothing.
Somebody who's sitting over here talking to coolest thing you have ever made with your hands.
I'm going to start pointing to people because that's the way it is.
A dulcimer?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Somebody just want me to include you made with a rather rare pie like I made a book.
I think we established what you let start out.
So we have these cool websites where you can share things and make that whole cycle happen
faster, happen more easily.
It was really difficult.
It didn't happen before the internet because basically we needed the internet for this cycle
to keep happening.
It makes it possible.
It makes the learning easier.
And then it makes the manufacturing and the sourcing and the marketing easier and the entire
cycle.
Things that used to take years and years and tens of thousands of dollars.
Now, don't require that or a bunch of guys sitting around a desk, signing papers, which
all of it did before.
It just happens that somebody's living room.
Or, we're likely in a hacker space.
Now, I kind of used the words hacker space and maker space relatively interchangeably and
we get our due later about the pond distinctions, but just grow and move for now.
We don't have so much time.
This is from a hacker space in Berlin.
I thought that was a really great way to decorate the wall.
In fact, make was originally where it would be called hack.
And Dale Dewardy's daughter was like, how past some bad connotations?
And so that was how it got to be made.
So, if you've heard me give a talk before, you know that I sent you home with a reading list.
So, we have finished tomorrow's next up is the maker movement manifesto, which was written by Mark Hatch.
He didn't start tech shops, but he's the CEO of Empowerment since about 2007.
Tech shops are a for-profit chain of hackers' spaces, essentially, a place where you can go and get access to all of those great tools.
He has a pretty bold vision for tech shop.
He believes that it has unique opportunity to arm a maker movement army with the tools that needs to change itself in the world.
Basically, he's saying tech shop can do exactly what I am asking all of you to go forth and help the open source community do.
But, he spends the whole book backing up his thesis.
So much so that after a while, the stories of the books start to feel a little repetitive and like, great, got a founded company.
It was successful. Another guy founded a company. Successful. Somebody up?
Yeah. But, there are all great stories.
Tech shop Hatch Square, which is the little payment device that I'm sure you'd use to sum it up in a coffee shop.
And, do it a case, which are these little phones slash wallet cases.
And, these are both really good stories in the book about the success of failing fast.
How failing fast leads to succeeding quickly and how building something in an open space like tech shop or another hacker space led to a better product.
And, so this book is story after story like this.
And, almost all of them are non-engineers with a new background in using any of the tools in tech shop who walked in one day
and a week later or a month later or six months or a year later had a huge successful business.
But, I have to tell you about my favorite one.
My favorite story in the whole book.
Hatch is walking around tech shop asking people what are you working on.
And, he runs into this guy. This middle age guy who's working on this thing that he describes as
a poorly constructed clunky aluminum block like structure.
And, guy says, I'm working on a desktop diamond manufacturing device.
And, then Mark Hatch decides he's a little bit crazy when he says, oh, yeah, it's helped me more.
And, the guy says, yes, all I mean now is to rip him back in a tron out of a microwave for the necessary plasma ball.
And, I think I'm good.
And, that's when he starts calling him crazy Mike.
But, it turns out, crazy Mike is actually a physicist who works in a diamond deposition tool company.
He actually has experience in this and hopes so succeeding.
And, his in goal, which is fantastic, is to make a diamond ring for his wife.
And, I mean, a diamond ring with a diamond in it.
I mean, a diamond that she can wear.
But, it's important about the story.
It doesn't matter if crazy Mike ever succeeds.
It's a matter that he estimated from his industry experience that even try this through the normal beans would have cost him $80,000.
But, a tech shop had cost him $1,000.
That is a literally industry changing factor of cost.
And, the book is story after story of people with successes like this.
Things that used to take months or years to source a manufacturer now take a week.
When you've gone from your life savings and a year of your life to a quarterly bonus and a week or a month,
that's a sort of change that can completely turn around how R&D and manufacturing in the entire way we know tangible goods come into existence works.
And, the openness and sharing of that process, the fact that it happens with other people, is absolutely critical to making it happen at all.
So, I'll tell you a few more examples of great things that are happening.
I think some of the most interesting are in the BioHacker spaces.
So, a BioHacker space simply means that instead of a CNC machine and a 3D printer,
they have PCR machines and DNA isolation and scene perfuges and incubators and microscopes and basically a university biology lab.
Except, anybody can use it without the trappings of academia and an advisor telling you what you're allowed to work on.
And, they've come out with some really interesting successes and if you ever happen to encounter one at a conference like this,
this past, I guess, January at scale, the Southern California Linux Expo,
they had a BioHacker space there and they let you paint with E. coli on tree dishes.
We're just super fun and to the night people.
It's safe E. coli. Also, I don't recommend looking at your paintings.
But if you Google E. coli paintings, people do really cool stuff with this and that's a fun side of makers.
Obviously, there are way more useful things but E. coli paintings.
Also, then I lost it in my bedroom for a really long time and I found that it was not as cool.
There are also projects like those that spawn out of the Fukushima disaster and in particular with the Tokyo Hacker space
and some groups that were working with Raspberry Pi's.
And the community felt like it wasn't getting accurate or enough data about radiation
and the truth about the radiation that they were encountering on a daily basis anymore.
And so this is actually still existing based on the infrastructure they set up.
It's accurate radiation readings based on open hardware that this is a Yahoo site that pulls their open data
and puts it into a map for anyone to use.
My final story isn't about a project. It's for those of you who like me or parents
and it's perhaps your job more than anyone else's to encourage your children to go and do all of these things.
This is a kid named Jack and he's really cool and then he won the Intel Science Fair Award
when he was 15 years old for developing a test for the early stages of pancreatic ovarian and lung cancer.
Which is super cool, but I think his mom is great.
I run an interview with her and she's an anesthetist and they asked about having a son
who was doing this stuff. So his school made him take his homemade art furnace back to his house
because you know, fire. And they asked his mom what she thought.
And she said, I told him don't burn down the house or kill yourself or your brothers.
I don't know enough physics in math to know if that's a death ray or not.
But she didn't tell him no. And that's the important part.
She told him to go do it. Heck, I don't know if he built a death ray.
But if he did, good job. Don't kill anybody with it.
And all of that is the power of the maker. And you already know the power of open source.
And we all know the importance now of creating to humanity.
And so I believe it's up to us, you and me and all of the rest of the open source software community
who has seen for far more years than the burgeoning maker in open hardware communities,
the importance of openism and how much more successful it is in the alternative.
To go out there, go forth and become a part of these communities and to share with them what we've learned.
You all believe in open and you know now what you thought so at the beginning or not
that you are all makers. So go forth and make things better. Thanks.
Thank you very much.
I still don't know how to make a homemade art furnace.
Good question now.
How would I become a maker?
That's a really exciting question because I think I got bored that way.
My mom taught me how to sew.
You saw back in the beginning and I made a lot of costumes for me in my kids.
My mom taught me to sew by drawing lines on a piece of paper and she would unthread the machine
and maybe follow them.
And now I'm at the point where I want to teach my own kids the same thing.
I'm like, oh, she still needs a figure.
I don't know how that worked.
But I think the key is to changing your mindset to not I want to buy that thing to.
I want to make that thing.
How did that thing get put together?
Figure out what you're passionate about.
Do you love music? Figure out how to make a musical instrument.
Whatever you love to do, go on Instructables and you know what?
You love Star Wars.
Go on Instructables and search for Star Wars and find some crazy RGP2 projects you want to make.
One of my favorite Raspberry Pi projects is an R2-D2.
It is a lifestyles bilingual Japanese and English command taking video recording R2-D2 unit.
I think that would be an excellent place to scope.
No, that is not a good place to start.
It is a highly successful project because the guy made it for his girlfriend for Valentine's Day
and now they're married so clearly it worked.
But it made up a year for getting a maker project.
No, we just go to a cost or a hobby store, hack even radio chat like the good guy not the self-in-store guy.
And just buy some parts.
Actually, the first thing my coworker and who wrote the book with me and I got on Eta Fruit
we just bought a pile of parts and started making things out of them.
That's what our book is.
It's a pile of parts and warnings that you shouldn't do this, but you should.
Any other questions?
I haven't heard it anywhere in Linux Fest today.
What's your take or have you talked to them more specifically?
Body and Sean Cross about the Domino Project?
Yeah, it's going.
I haven't heard anything about it in this conference and I'm kind of a little bit involved.
I'm really excited.
Do you think that that's a step in the right direction or do you think?
I think it's an amazing project and not only because Sean came and he noted the Fedora conference
for a couple months ago.
So the question for those you can hear was about the Domino Project which is an open hardware laptop.
And it's created by the people who created the Chumbeat if you remember that little device.
I still have one that wakes me up every morning even though technically it's a dead project.
Yeah, they're definitely still in process and doing some really great things, I think.
If you see me after we should have recorded his keynote where he talks about all of what's new and all
and it was only in August.
He's up.
I watched it.
Oh yeah, okay.
Well, hey, you already know as much as I do then.
Somebody had a back out of question.
Do you think the popularity of social media sites have helped or hurt the maker movement?
I was totally helped.
Like, why do you think that social media hurts the maker movement?
Well, I don't think it hurts.
I think the use of social media by some individual agencies is not exactly conducive to productivity.
Well, so you don't follow those terms.
Problem solved.
I see people complain about so-and-so, so that's something neat on Twitter.
I'm following.
Done.
Yeah, the number of things I've learned about, like, I go back to the slide of weird random things I've made.
So many ideas I have gotten for things that I made were because of stuff.
Oh, actually, I can do this in multiple ways.
Okay, so that cake.
That's my kid's third birthday Star Wars cake.
It's Darth Vader on the bottom with Leon on the other side.
And Chewie with Hanzo on the other side.
And he's with you on the other side.
This is actually inspired by a superhero cake.
That was the same way.
But I'm like, Superman, what if we can make Star Wars cake?
Let's see.
The soundwave costume is because I really, really wanted to raspberry pi in a costume.
And this is the only thing that I've done with a raspberry pi that somebody else had already done.
But the one I was thinking of was probably the last one.
The Tartus Shoes.
I kept seeing other people with Tartus Shoes.
And I'm like, I only Tartus Shoes.
I mean, I thought about without social media and people putting them in my feet all the time.
Actually, that probably causes a lot of my time to go away when people make cool things that I didn't want.
That's another, if I got your pattern slash or has very high stories.
Many of the things that you think are original ideas are really not that original.
But they were originally your head.
But they were inspired by something else.
And somebody else probably already got inspired through it on the internet.
And that's not a bad thing.
That is your time saver.
Like now you get to go and see how they did it.
And not make the same mistakes.
That's not a bad thing.
And so I joked that everything that I wanted to make with a raspberry pi had already been made.
And that's actually how I discovered a lot of the cool Beggar counter projects.
It was because a guy at Red Hat sent an email to a list that said,
Hey, anybody got a Beggar counter a good bar for the weekend?
And I was like, hey, what did you do with it?
I don't have one.
I just wonder what you're doing.
He was great.
Could you fill me one with a raspberry pi?
Apparently, as you can.
Any other questions?
Because I can tell these are the guilt stories all day.
How can we as a community help promote others who do like electronic design or other design to use open hardware designs?
I have a friend who does electronic design.
And I've talked to them about the designs you come up with.
Releasing them open hardware.
And his reply to me is, the patents that we get is my employees' retirement.
Because we can sell them out to a larger company and then we can retire.
So how can we then explain to them,
there's things that are greater than just the monetary value?
Technically speaking, Red Hat has a large patent portfolio.
But it's a defensive patent portfolio and employees get awards just like that.
But not retirement level, that's impressive.
I think it's sort of along the lines of how people ask a lot,
you know, my company only uses windows or they insist that we use this closed source solution.
How do I convince these people that we use open source?
And I think it's a lot like that.
And then you have to find what the benefit is to that person.
What will resonate with them and their project and why it's important.
And so there are just gobs and gobs of stories.
Well, I mean, you know, turn to the hacker space stories
and how these things were built better with collaboration and with openness.
My absolute favorite, like why openness is important story.
And if you've ever heard me give a talk,
you've probably heard the stories and just come along with me.
It's good, you should hear it again.
And Karen Sandler, who is with the software free to conservancy now,
but she did just this talk about how she has a pacemaker
because she has a hard condition that requires her to have a pacemaker.
And when they put it in, she said, can I see the source code?
And they said, no, why would you want to see this?
Just us.
And so the medical device security center did this massive report
a study that they did on implanted medical devices,
because it's not just pacemakers.
And found that, number one, those devices carry a lot more information on them than I thought.
Like your name and medical information is on there.
And it's not encrypted.
And it basically takes what I carry around in my backpack on a daily basis
to intercept it and possibly solve your heart.
And that is the best story I have about why openness is important.
And that source code is not reviewed by the FDA,
unless the company that makes the device says, hey, could you use your source code?
Because you know they're all going to do that.
But yeah, you just find the thing that's important to them.
Or find the thing that's important to them.
Or find the thing that's important to them.
And that is the best story I have about why openness is important.
But yeah, you just find the thing that's important to them.
Or find, you know, depending on what they're making,
how could that be approved by some open device that you know about some other open hardware project?
Or just wait until some open hardware project does it better to be like,
ha ha, you should've done that.
Any other question?
So a lot of people looked at open source software and said, hey, that's cool.
We should do something like that.
So we have open education and we have open this.
We have open music.
We have, you know, open licenses to write and law and all kinds of things.
And it seems to me like with the maker movement,
where people are creating something that's a thing that they maybe they can sell,
that there is a difference between what we do with software,
which is infinitely reproducible versus making a thing.
But I just wondered if you disagreed with that in terms of,
because you're, I mean, your whole point, I guess, is that we should be encouraging that way.
To me, it seems like maybe there is a little bit of a difference.
Well, so I may have the plug.
And if I did, I apologize that I am opposed to profit.
I am not.
I would have heard about $1.00 per software company.
I think profit is awesome.
Bye.
That also means Brent Hatt and the many who have followed it have shown that it is possible
to be open and still make money.
Those things are not usually exclusive.
Now, Open Hardware has a different set of legal problems in that it is a tangible good.
And so it has different legal problems.
And I think that may be a contributing factor to what has made them go down a slightly different path.
But I still don't think it is impossible to separate, to bring together openness
and still making a profit.
There are plenty of projects that are still open.
Oh, look, Arduino somehow is making money.
All of these open-source 3D printers are somehow making money.
I am sorry to repeat how this works.
So yeah, I don't mean to apply that I don't think anyone should make money.
And I do think that tangible goods, whether Open Hardware, or something else,
have other hurdles that software doesn't.
But that doesn't mean that they can't both happen.
That it is your question, or that it is just rainbow.
You want a really nice after-source.com in your first couple of sentences.
You should write for them.
Okay.
Any other questions?
Thanks for listening.
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