PunjabOPEN SOURCE HARDWARE- An Emerging World of Opportunities

The IT world is witnessing phenomena of a kind due to massive availability of open source software, which has become an important part of software development process and has given people a wide range of choices and benefits. On parallel lines, the same is being conceptualized in hardware field also, not as an idea but as a reality. Free Open Source hardware (OSH) is relatively a new concept emerging in the world and internet is aiding in its vast spread across the trans-national boundaries. Chris Anderson in his book Free the future of Radical Price has predicted that hardware is the next natural extension of the open source movement. He further writes that we are very familiar with the concept of open source software but the new idea of extending that to hardware - from circuit boards all the way up to consumer gadgets, like Google Android phone, is just emerging.