CHAPTER 1

Introduction to the Open-Source Philosophy and the Benefits of Sharing

Prepare to explore an amazing collection of open-source projects shared by others—that literally create millions of dollars of wealth. You can do all these projects yourself by following in the footsteps of other Creative Commons users. Perhaps best of all—it is all free! Regardless of your experience, in doing your own projects, you have already benefited from this open-source sharing, even without knowing it. The internet is perhaps the best example because it is a massive collection of wildly successful open-source projects put together by millions of people sharing their time and talent. In these pages, you will learn about how to be a more proactive sharer in the Creative Commons to reap the benefits of enormous wealth for yourself and others, even if you have only a modest amount of money to start.

You can have all of this free stuff with the compliments of the global sharing community, which will be better for having you as an active member. Some of the creations are literally free, but even those that involve material supplies (such as hardware projects) will save you substantial amounts of money. There is so much free stuff that it may be tempting to grab as much free hardware and software as you can and then sit back and revel in your savings. Of course, you might never bother to share your own work. This would be a big mistake. Simply taking will unquestionably save you a lot of money, but then you will lose the opportunities that will offer you the greatest value—when others specifically help you.

It is great to get free stuff. I love it, too. It is far better, however, when you entice the sharing community to help you directly. You do this by sharing your own work with them for free. You can think of this as preemptive “paying it forward.” It is the right thing to do. This chapter discusses why you should want to be nice and share your work with the global community.

Why We Share Aggressively

Not only should you seek to share your work, you should do it aggressively, and share it as widely as possible. There are many valuable benefits to aggressively sharing your own work in the global open-source community. Let me tell you about four.

First, when you post your work freely online, there is the potential for massive peer review. Peer review is a fancy way of describing having others take a look at your work. This starts from perhaps simple compliments and comments or questions about your artwork. This feels nice and may be modestly helpful. It can, however, be far more useful. For example, have you ever had a cool idea for a new technology and wondered whether it could be brought to life—but you didn’t have the money or time to bring in an engineering firm to have a go at it? Now you can. By sharing your idea in the appropriate circles, that idea can go all the way to detailed technical discussions of your new technology designs by trained engineers—for free! Sharing gives you an avenue to new friends who share your interests and passions. Feedback often comes from others with the same interests. These people can be amateurs or even professionals in your field of interest. Their feedback can improve your skills or even your specific projects. Often, truly different perspectives from people living all over the world can be invaluable in themselves.

Second, by sharing, you are gaining visibility for your interests and passions. Ironically, freely sharing your work also could lead to you getting a job! If you are considering working or volunteering for a business, nonprofit organization (NPO), or community organization that could use your talents and skills, you are essentially advertising your skills. The open-source community has helped my engineering students when talking with recruiters, because they are able to talk about their project in depth, and the recruiters can see for themselves what the students have worked on. For example, it is quite common now for software programmers to advertise their skills by helping on open-source software projects. This “advertising” can be useful in helping you get a job or recruit collaborators, customers, and even employees.

Third, when you provide high-quality documentation for your creations, they can also be used as educational aides. This has the benefit that young users and those training in your field of interest can learn “your way” of doing things. Thus, future collaborators or employees can be trained using your techniques. The most successful open-source projects are those that became a platform. They provide a base that others can use to build on—often in unexpected ways.

For example, one of the first designs I posted online that could be digitally manufactured by others was a humble fabric fastener. This two-piece device allows you to get a firm hold on any type of fabric or plastic sheet without puncturing it. The first part of the device, which I called the lock (shown in blue), fits closely into the base, which I call the star because of its resemblance to a ninja throwing star (shown in red; see Figure 1.1). To use the device, you wrap the lock in the fabric with its flat side touching the fabric. Then you push the lock and the fabric through the hole in the star. Finally, turn the lock piece 90 degrees, and pull it into place (as shown in the upper right in Figure 1.1, where it is grabbing a Scottish blanket). To take the fastener off, just reverse the steps.

Figure 1.1 Open-source textile fastener. (CC BY-SA) www.appropedia.org/Printable_non-puncturing_textile_fastener

How does this work? Because the fabric is in contact with the assembly over a relatively large surface area, all the forces are spread out. What this means practically is that even relatively delicate fabrics will not rip unless you try something absurd. The large surface area allows the applied force in an application such as a stretcher to be spread out far enough that the fabric is prevented from ripping or sliding off. When an external force is applied (such as when you lift the stretcher), you are actually pulling the two pieces of the fastener together. This holds the fabric more tightly, rather than pulling the pieces apart. This clever little design will not accidentally fall apart unless the force is removed and considerable effort is put into unlocking the device. I found that the device could work with any type of textile from blankets and clothing material to tarps and tents. The clearance between the lock and the star will need to be adjusted if you are working with either very thin (e.g., silk) or very thick (e.g., a quilt) materials. This is easy to do in any free slicing software for 3D printers (which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 12). Both the lock and the star have multiple holes that can be used either with tie lines or nails depending on your application. This device has numerous useful applications around the home, no matter where you live. I came up with what I thought was a reasonably exhaustive list of applications:

  Stretcher: Six fasteners, a blanket, and two poles

  Hammock: Two fasteners and a blanket

  Emergency tent: Four fasteners and a plastic sheet or tarp

  Greenhouse or row guard: Use however many fasteners you need and clear plastic to create a greenhouse.

  Food transport: Use some form of fabric and four fasteners to make a flexible box for carrying such things as vegetables.

  Improved tarps:

  You can use a fastener to fix a grommet that has popped out of a normal tarp.

  You can also use a number of fasteners to join multiple tarps together into a bigger tarp.

  You can create a custom waterproof cover.

  You can use the fasteners to hold the tarp in a custom way for another function, such as rainwater collection or a roof leak or a boat protector.

Oh—but boy was I wrong! By the end of the month in which I posted the design, someone had turned it into a remote control holder for the Wii to improve game play by attaching it to a glove—all without destroying the glove, so that the holder could be snapped on and off. Then Josh Smith wanted a way to turn a blanket into a cloak. He designed a blanket cloak clasp using my design and a bear sculpture from another open-source sharer to make a really cool reusable cloak clasp that looks like a bear head (see Figure 1.2). The design works nicely because you can switch in another blanket when the first one gets dirty. Or, if you want to use the cloak as a blanket again, after Halloween or your cosplay outing, just take the clasp off. This was cool—and certainly not the direction I was thinking to go with the simple design.

However, my little design was not done yet. In its small way, it helped a much more sophisticated project that is anything but a game or a fun way to keep your shoulders warm. My fabric fastener was used to improve the fasteners of the Waterpod. The Waterpod (as seen in a model in Figure 1.3) is an open-source floating structure designed as a futuristic habitat. It is an experimental platform for assessing the design and efficacy of living systems that is using shared ideas in many different ways. The main goal of the Waterpod project is to create an autonomous, fully functional marine shelter. This is a pretty ambitious project. I am happy to know that I helped it in a small way, just as I am happy to help Wii gamers improve their play or to help make cool blanket cloak holders. Helping others feels good. This is one of the beauties of the open-source approach.

Figure 1.2 Open-source bear-themed coat clasp. The design is by Josh Smith. ([CC BY] www.thingiverse.com/thing:3463125), and the image is compliments of E. Bow Pearce (CC BY).

Figure 1.3 Waterpod project concept rendering. (Antony Kim, CC BY-SA) http://www.appropedia.org/images/9/9d/Waterpod2.jpg

When you share something in the global commons, you are planting a seed. Others may help that seed grow into a mighty tree—perhaps beyond your wildest ideas. Through a modest effort on my part to share the design for something I had already made for myself, I helped others. I may never meet them or benefit, but making the world a slightly better place is its own reward. That said, improvements built on your seed idea are reshared back with others and continue to be built upon. Best of all, these improvements, remixes, and mash-ups are all available for free to you as well. Who knows? Maybe I will need a water-based habitat sometime and directly benefit from the initial sharing of my fabric fastener. Honestly though, as captivating as Kevin Costner was in Waterworld, I hope not.

Amazingly, the sentiment that underlies modern open-source innovation is truly ancient. Even the Old Testament spoke to it in Proverbs 11:25: “A person who gives to others will get richer. Whomever helps others will himself be helped.” To see how this can work even from modest sharing in our modern networked world, consider the cartoon in Figure 1.4. This cartoon explains how far sharing can spread using existing models (discussed in detail in this book). It tells the story of a simple act of sharing. You could literally do it with the phone in your pocket now. We can all make such an effort, and the cartoon shows how this simple act can expand far beyond the plans of the original sharer.

The story shown in Figure 1.4 is of a woman named Jen who used a series of life hacks (covered in Chapter 2) that simplified her life. With this saved time, she decided to go for a hike. On the hike, she noticed a single flower. It was a pretty flower. She pulled out her cellphone and snapped a picture of it. Then, to make sure she got a really good picture, she slowly walked around the flower and took a few dozen more shots in rapid succession. The whole process took her a minute or two. Now normally she would have deleted all but the best picture and saved it for herself. But what if she chose to share those pictures instead?

Figure 1.4 Cartoon of sharing (original art).

Spending another few minutes to go to an online photo-sharing site (as discussed in Chapter 3) called Pexels (www.pexels.com), she uploaded and tagged her pictures “Flowers” and “Rose” and released them under a Creative Commons (CC0) license. This put them in the public domain so that anyone could use them for any purpose. Because Jen shared, others can now use the photographs in any way they like. Because she uploaded and tagged all of them, they are easy to find. They provide a range of options, so Jen’s pictures were viewed and used by many people she may never meet.

The first person to see the pictures was a botanist from Melbourne working on improving a free online encyclopedia’s (Wikipedia, wikipedia.org) articles on flowers. He used one of the photos there by posting it on WikiMedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org) so that others would know what a specific variety of rose looks like. These images can also be used to train open-source image-analysis software and artificial intelligence programs to identify roses.

The Wikipedia article mentioned that all roses are edible plants. Another wiki editor, a Peace Corps student, decided to port the information to Appropedia (appropedia.org), a website devoted to sustainability and poverty reduction, to a page covering edible wild plants.

A chef, having read the Appropedia article, decided to use the image for her wild food book. Each recipe was accompanied by both a photo of the final mouth-watering dish, as well as pictures of the wild plants that made it. The chef wrote the book in Libre Office (www.libreoffice.org, a free office suite discussed in Chapter 6). In addition to selling the hard copy of the book, the chef posted the digital version for free under an open license on Freebooks (www.free-ebooks.net).

Because the chef shared her book for free, a couple decided to make an audio version. They recorded themselves cooking, making mistakes, and showing their friends trying the food. It was pretty funny. One of their friends took the audio, cleaned it up with Audacity (sourceforge.net/projects/audacity, a free audio mixer, covered in Chapter 5), and turned it into a full audio version and posted it on LibriVox (librivox.org, which provides free public-domain audio books).

Another writer, using Scribus (scribus.net), decided to use one of the other views of the rose in a picture book of flowers for children and posted it on Free Kids Books (freekidsbooks.org). A kindergarten teacher liked it so much that she printed it out for her students to enjoy in class.

Then an artist downloaded one of the photographs and used it to create a fantastic piece of digital art using the open-source digital painting program Krita (krita.org). He then shared it on Deviantart (deviantart.com, a community of online artists, covered in Chapter 4).

A band manager really liked the flower art and decided to use it on a concert poster for his band and posted it on the band’s website. The poster was hung all around town. A music fan liked the poster so much that he used the image for a T-shirt and made a bunch for all his friends. The lead vocalist of the band wore the T-shirt at a concert. The band recorded its music from the concert and posted it on the Free Music Archive (freemusicarchive.org, covered in Chapter 5).

A disk jockey downloaded the mp3 of the songs, added them to a mix CD of free music, and then printed a copy of the flower picture to use as the cover of the CD case. Then things started to get out of hand. A cat owner decided to make a mini-me version of the flower T-shirt for her cat. Her boyfriend took a video (as discussed in Chapter 7) on his phone of the cat dancing to the band’s music and posted it on YouTube, and it went viral. The cat’s moves were so good that a movie graphics team used them as a model for creating a digital cartoon of a dancing cat using Blender (blender.org). The larger video was released by the Dutch Blender Foundation and used the music from the band in the scene.

A clothes designer saw the image on the band’s website too and decided to make a dress out of it. The dress design was also shared for free, and then manufacturers (including home-based clothing printers, which we will meet in Chapter 9) began producing it at low cost. The manufacturers shipped the dresses all over the world and needed to set up pricing using free maps overlayed with geographic information system (GIS)–based shipping information (Chapter 8). Jen’s mom bought her one for her birthday and put it in a wooden box that her father had made for her using open-source woodworking tools and techniques (Chapter 10).

Meanwhile, the other 29 photographs of the flower sat in a database. They didn’t do anything for a while. Then a 3D designer downloaded them all—harvesting them like a bear eating blueberries in the same field by the rose. The designer used AliceVision and MeshRoom (alicevision.github.io) for free photogrammetry. This is a fancy way of combining photos to make a 3D object. First, he created a point cloud, which he then turned into a mesh and finally a stereolithography (STL) file. He 3D printed the flower using the STL file, and he gave it to his wife for their anniversary. She was really happy because he had made it specifically for her. It meant more to her than any store-bought trinket. She gave him a big kiss. He figured that he better pass the goodwill forward. He posted the 3D design (discussed in Chapter 12) of the flower on YouMagine (youmagine.com), a website from Ultimaker, a European open-source 3D printer company. The 3D flower began to be downloaded a lot because it was so realistic. Many people used open-source electronics (Chapter 11) to drive their own homemade 3D printers (Chapter 12) to make physical copies. Computer-aided design (CAD) specialists from all over the world began to make various mash-ups of the 3D flower with things they were making. One of them made a curtain holder. Another made a pipette stand for scientists (Chapter 13) that is used by citizen scientists studying drinking water in their cities (Chapter 14). Still another made a rose-covered tablet computer holder. It took several tries, but the waste was reused with a recyclebot (Chapter 15) and converted back to feedstock for the 3D printers. Someone else made a vase with the rose all over it—and then a hydroponics system for his open-source house (Chapter 16). People from all over the world began downloading and sharing these designs, as well as printing them out as gifts. One of those people was Jen’s husband, who printed out the vase and gave it to her on Valentine’s day. Overall, the sharing of the pictures of the rose with the global Creative Commons community generated millions of dollars of value (Chapter 17).

The story ends with Jen at home in the flower art dress watching the cartoon cat video with the rose-inspired music on her open-source DLT1 tablet (published by Hackaday, hackaday.io/project/164845-dlt-one-a-damn-linux-tablet) and eating flower hors d’oeuvres she had read about in the cookbook. She has a bunch of roses next to her in a 3D-printed rose vase.

This is the future of how we all grow rich by sharing (Chapter 18). In each case in the cartoon, each person only made a small contribution. However, in aggregate, a single flower in a field had a major impact by inspiring people from all over the world to use their creativity to create value. Sharing enabled the value to scale the wealth laterally through many peers. This is an example of peer production. Everyone benefited from the sharing. Similar sharing moments are occurring all over the world as more people join the free and open-source community. As this happens, our collective wealth grows exponentially.

The benefits for individuals are clear, and it may be that people are joining simply out of self-interest. Those who join are following a well-established ethic first seen in the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement. The FOSS ethic was developed first by computer programmers sometimes called hackers.

One of the greatest gifts the FOSS movement has provided is a complete software ecosystem—all free. You can take advantage of this by getting far more life out of your current computer. At my university, computers are passed down from one user to another until they are so old they no longer work with Microsoft Windows. Then they are discarded as e-waste. We save as many as possible, and my lab is run primarily on these discarded computers because we resurrect them with free and open-source operating systems based on GNU/Linux. This saves us money—a lot of it—but also we get the performance we want because Linux is truly technically superior to Windows. You can do this too. There are hundreds of different kinds of Linux (called distributions or distros, distrowatch.com/), but for new users I recommend Linux Mint (www.linuxmint.com). Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions and is used by millions of people because:

  It works out of the box, with full multimedia support.

  It is extremely easy to use.

  It is completely free of cost and open source.

  It is community driven. Users are encouraged to send feedback to the project so that their ideas can be used to improve Linux Mint.

  It is safe and reliable because of a conservative approach to software updates.

  It requires very little maintenance (no regressions, no antivirus, no antispyware, etc.).

  It is based on Debian (www.debian.org), which is for the hardcore user, and Ubuntu (ubuntu.com), which is one of the other major distributions. This means that it provides support for a massive number of free programs—about 30,000 packages in all with supereasy-to-use software managers.

In the free Linux ecosystem, there is free software for just about anything you could want. Throughout the rest of this book, I will highlight free software that is particularly good for creating. If there is any other software you want that does not come with Linux, you can probably find an equivalent free software at OSALT (osalt.com). To get started with Linux Mint, simply follow the instructions on the following website to download it and make a bootable USB drive: https://linuxhint.com/install_linux_mint_19/. Then you can “try it before you buy it” by booting off of the USB drive and making sure you can use it. If all goes well, you can back up all your files and permanently install the software from the USB drive. Then load up all your personal files, and you have a state-of-the-art operating system. I am quite confident that you will see an immediate improvement in performance. It will be faster, and you will have at your fingertips any software you need simply by searching in the software manager for it and clicking the big green Install button—it all installs automatically for free. It just works, and we have the sharing community of thousands of FOSS developers to thank for it.

Through principles of free sharing and open access, open-source development treats users as developers. This is really clear among software developers who use their own code. This is because FOSS encourages contributions from everyone—as long as they are good. Good work is recognized and included in newer versions of the code. This has the effect of propagating superior software code. When we think about sharing beyond software, we simply expand the definition of code to mean the information needed to make anything from a song to a table rather than only computer software. This philosophy can be thought of as growing from the “white-knight hackers” who created the open-source movement with their hacker ethic, which embraces the following general principles (Levy, 1984, 2001):

1. Sharing

2. Openness

3. Decentralization

4. Free access, and

5. World improvement

The FOSS movement has produced a community of hackers and computer programmers whose shared goal is to work together to develop better computer software (DiBona, Ockman, and Stone, 1999). Remarkably, they have been outrageously successful! This philosophy of life works because it is supported by the gift culture of open source, in which recognition of an individual is determined by the amount of knowledge he or she gives away (Bergquist and Ljungberg, 2001). In such a system, the more valuable the gift, the more respect you gain. Literally, the more you give, the richer you become. Although such thinking may be reminiscent of the gift giving within the Hobbit communities in J. R. R. Tolkien’s stories (2012), there are also modern analogues. Philanthropists know that the more they give away, the greater is their esteem. In addition, academics use this philosophy, which rewards contributors through a process of peer review of scientific articles. The more good ideas academics share, the higher is the respect they command, the larger are their number of invitations to speak, and the more funds they can attract to continue their research. We have all had the experience of perhaps giving some advice to a stranger for free and enjoying the gratitude—and expecting similar help from others in return, no matter how small the request. When someone asks, “Where is the bathroom?”, you will always tell them to help them out—and even if you are in another country, you can be sure “¿Dónde está el baño?” will get you some good-quality, free and timely information.

The reason this works so well is that all humans are actually hardwired to be nice. This may be hard to believe with the seemingly endless stream of terrible atrocities we read about in the news. There do seem to be a lot of them. If you think, however, about all the billions of people that every day manage not to commit any atrocities, there may be something to the “humans are nice” theory.

The Theory of Nice

We all prefer to hang around nice people. How many of your friends are not nice people—or at least nice to you? We do not need to read the scientific literature to know that nice people have more friends. It turns out that a huge number of studies go far beyond this to show that being nice is the way to go—not only for you, but for all of society.

For example, Harvard University’s celebrated evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak (2011) explains that cooperation is the central key to the success of the 4-billion-year-old puzzle of life. Consider the following scenario: You are on the sidewalk in front of a store, and you notice a small child chasing a ball. The child is not looking and is about to enter the street, where he will almost certainly be hit by an oncoming car. Your natural reaction is probably to yell “Stop!” You might rush into the street to save the child. Good for you! But wait, why would you trouble yourself at all, let alone risk your own life, to run into the street to save a stranger’s kid? You do it because your ancestors had a distinct evolutionary advantage to cooperate. Those selfish cave dwellers who did not help one another or cooperate got left alone by the clans to starve on the savanna. It is now clear that cooperation, not competition, is the defining human trait (Nowak, 2011). In fact, humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short,” although some started that way—those who made it all the way through are inborn to be good (Keltner, 2009).

Consider this: I am working on a building project at home while looking after my pre-preschool-age son. I drop a screwdriver on the floor, and my 2-year-old son grabs it and hands it back to me, without my asking, pointing, or otherwise telling him what to do. Now it is true that he is awesome, but it turns out that in this behavior, he is not special. You can run this same experiment in front of any young child and get the same result. This is not a learned behavior at all. Psychologist Michael Tomasello, who runs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, has shown through exhaustive observations of experiments on young children that children are helpful by default (Tomasello, 2009). Human children are naturally (and, I should mention, uniquely in the animal kingdom) cooperative. Other species just do not cooperate, even when they can. There are not a lot of cooperative bears. But even with animals that are closer to human mental abilities and DNA, the answer is the same. For example, when apes are put through similar experiments to those used with human children, they demonstrate the ability to work together and share. However, they choose not to. This is why we do not currently live on the “Planet of the Apes.” Ape selfishness has made them evolutionary losers that we go to visit at cages in the zoo. We cooperative humans, not the selfish apes, are the dominant species on the planet. As our children grow, their hardwired desire to help without expectation of reward sadly often becomes diluted and perverted by a selfish, materialistic culture.

This dilution is counterproductive to our success. Unfortunately, evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest has been misunderstood. Some people thought that we could transfer survival of the fittest between species (such as us and apes) and transfer it to social interactions among humans. Many people bought this theory, most notably those in some corporate cultures. Following this flawed theory, it is argued that concepts such as charity, fairness, forgiveness, and cooperation are evolutionary dead ends, which are soon to go extinct. Using this flawed theory, some people are encouraged to pursue their own self-interest at all costs. Anyone who has played a team sport like basketball, soccer, hockey, or football might immediately notice the flaw in this logic based on their practical experience. Amazingly, selfishness still holds incredible sway in our culture. Yet you do not even need to be an athlete to see something wrong with someone always hogging the metaphorical ball. You know from your relationships that a strategy of all-out selfishness does not work in the real world. Selfish people are normally considered “jerks” and ostracized in our society. The enlightened gambler thus bets on being nice. Believe it or not, being nice may also help you to find an attractive date. It turns out that both sexes consider that individuals who invest in altruistic acts are better candidates for long-term relationships (Moore et al., 2013). See any Hallmark movie for additional evidence.

The hardwired cooperative nature of humans, however, can also be a two-edged sword—particularly for small children. As our children become more aware of being members of a group, the group’s mutual expectations can either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. In our very recent past, greed has even been elevated to a virtue. Remember that the 1980s have been called the “decade of greed.” This has the unfortunate result of watering down our intrinsic cooperative nature, which has been built up through evolution and been fostered in nearly every culture until very recently (Gensler, 2004).

Yet we can overcome this bad programming and regain our cooperative nature. It comes out even in the worst times. As I write this book under a government-mandated “shelter in place” law during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is hard not to notice the good news among all the death and suffering. People from all over the world are donating their gifts to help others—many volunteering to risk their lives in the world’s hot spots to care for the critically ill. There is also an explosion of free and open-source designs (Pearce, 2020a) meant to help others—including open-source ventilators (Pearce, 2020b), face shields (Prusa Research, 2020), and masks (Free Sewing, 2020), among others. Many different kinds of makers are fabricating personal protective equipment (PPE) for their local hospitals and helping each other in their communities. To see how widespread this type of sharing and caring is, consider just one group called Helpful Engineering (2020). This group has congregated to aid in the COVID-19 pandemic response by developing both open-source hardware and open-source software. The “helpful engineers” are working on a wide range of medical devices to create solutions that can be quickly reproduced and assembled locally worldwide. Although just starting out, the group has more than 2,500 registered volunteers, and its “Slack team” has grown extremely quickly to more than 9,000 by March of 2020. These makers are largely professional engineers, but other makers, such as homebound American volunteers, are sewing thousands upon thousands of face masks to help shield doctors, nurses, and everyone else from the coronavirus (Enrich, Abrams, and Kurutz, 2020). This is just one group of many. It is nothing short of amazing to see how large the distributed net around the world is and how the makers have rallied to meet the needs of the medical community.

Meet the Makers

Even outside this crisis, ways to apply our hardwired niceness can be found in the modern maker movement. Makers, for example, have a mutual expectation of collaboration. There are a lot of makers, and their numbers are swelling. For example, a recent estimate by USA Today puts the number of adult makers in the United States alone at 135 million, which is well over half (57 percent) of the American population aged 18 years and older. The maker movement itself is a relatively new, contemporary subculture. The maker movement now represents a technology-based extension of the more old-school do-it-yourself (DIY) culture.

Makers are often depicted on TV and in the movies. Legendary maker MacGyver from the 1980s is known for his talents for improvising technical solutions to insane problems—or perhaps, more modernly, Tony Stark, the Iron Man superhero from Marvel’s Avengers movies, or Kaylee, the engineer from Sci-Fi’s Firefly known for her own “MacGyverisms” to keep a spaceship afloat. People who make their own stuff—from dinner to clothes, from fixing their own cars to constructing their own staircases—this is what it means to be a maker.

These real-life makers enjoy engineering-oriented pursuits for fun, such as electronics, robotics, 3D printing, and the use of computer numerical control (CNC) tools, as well as more traditional activities, such as metalworking, woodworking, knitting, sewing, and traditional arts and crafts. They are all about sharing their love for the technologies—both new and old. The maker culture, however, stresses new and unique applications of technologies and encourages invention prototyping—and, of course, sharing and building on one another’s work. There is a strong focus on using and learning practical skills, passing them on, and applying them creatively. If you are interested in meeting some makers, the best place is normally a local hackerspace or makerspace, which are community-operated physical places where people can meet and work on their projects (wiki.hackerspaces.org). Makerspaces are sprouting up all over the United States (see Figure 1.5). Makers are not just playing around, although both in fictional literature (see Makers by Cory Doctorow [craphound.com/makers] for an excellent fictional introduction to the subculture) and in reading their blogs, it looks like fun. With free and open-source hardware (FOSH) makers starting from where the FOSS community has left off, there are burgeoning communities of hackers and makers working together to build everything from open-source cameras (which we discuss in Chapter 3), to videos (Chapter 7), to recycling (Chapter 15). Makers are even predicted to foster the next great industrial revolution (Taylor, 2012).

Figure 1.5 Screen shot of the MakerMap. For an updated version, see http://themakermap.com/

Concluding Thoughts

This chapter explored reasons why you would want to be more sharing. It is natural—you are hardwired to do it. Luckily, there are also extremely pragmatic and self-serving advantages to joining the open-source community. Cooperation provides both our species and our organizations, and you, with a distinct competitive advantage. It is important to remember that you do not need to be Elon Musk (the billionaire responsible for open-sourcing part of the Tesla electric car, which we will learn more about in Chapter 16) to make a significant contribution. Every little bit of sharing has an impact and can snowball into something fantastic! To see some examples, next we will explore a large collection of free stuff you may want to enjoy, making projects of your own as compliments to those of seasoned sharers.

References

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