Measuring Openness in Open Source Hardware with the Open-o-Meter

Open Source Hardware (OSH) products are those whose design are made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell them. In spite of the increasing popularity of this novel approach to intellectual property in product innovation, practice communities have faced difficulties to refine this concept into sharp and practical terms. There is to date no widely acknowledged criteria for determining whether a product is open source or not. Assuming OSH follows the same development path as Open Source Software and becomes a mainstream approach, the issue of conformance will also become critical for both producers and consumers. To address this gap, this contribution introduces a self-declared product openness marking scheme allowing to rate the openness of a product. Looking forward, it provides conceptual inputs for the future establishment of technical standards bringing clarity in this emerging and moving field.