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# Description
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OHR Manifesto
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The Open Hardware Repository is a place on the web for electronics
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designers to collaborate on open hardware designs, much in the
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philosophy of the free software movement. There are numerous advantages
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to working in a completely open environment:
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- Peer review. If you are a designer in a somewhat small team, or even
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alone, you can get very useful feedback from others by exposing your
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ideas in an open space. Chances are somebody has similar interests
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to yours and more experience.
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- Design reuse. The OHR has its origins (and initial scope) in the
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community of electronics designers working in experimental physics
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laboratories. One of its goals is to reduce the number of different
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teams working independently to solve the same problems, in order to
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make better systems with less time and effort.
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- Better collaboration with industry. The current business model for
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most commercial design companies is to keep the details of design
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secret. While this might maximize the margins of some companies it
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has no advantage for the customers. We believe that a business model
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based on companies designing in the OHR and getting paid for it is
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perfectly feasible, and would result in better products and the
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possibility for the customer to improve them and debug them more
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effectively.
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- Last but not least, designing in an open environment is definitely
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more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that
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having fun results in better hardware.
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There are two different areas in the OHR:
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- Project pages are under the responsibility of a given project
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leader. There are two requirements for any project to qualify for
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OHR support:
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- Everything needed to review the design and to produce the final
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hardware must be published. This includes schematics and PCB
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layout in some human-readable open format, bill of materials,
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mechanical drawings, manufacturing files, etc. Submitting the
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electronics CAD files in case someone uses the same design
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software and wants to modify the design is encouraged but not
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requested. A project leader is free to use any licensing scheme
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for a given design, provided it is compatible with the OHR goals
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stated in this document. One good candidate for open design is
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the Open Hardware License
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(\[\[http://www.tapr.org/ohl.html\]\[OHL\]\]).
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- The project must present an interest to the community of
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electronics designers for experimental physics facilities. This
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community being very wide and diverse, we don’t think this is a
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very troublesome constraint.
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- OHR pages are used to provide design information on different
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topics, with the objective of fostering good design practice and
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productive discussions on electronics.
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We hope that the OHR will be a worthy contribution to a change in design
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paradigms and practices towards more openness and quality.
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