"Necessity of open source projects
From a computer on everyone's desktop to a smart phone on everyone's hand, this is a popularization process of information technology. This popularization process has greatly accelerated the mutual transmission of our knowledge, thus promoting the development of social productivity. The development process of maker movement is essentially the popularization process of industrial manufacturing technology. Many manufacturing resources and technical resources that could only be used in large enterprises and factories are now being popularized to the public in a way of continuously reducing costs. In the future, everyone's desktop may not only be a computer, but also have a 3D printer, a laser cutting machine, a mechanical arm and a set of development kit...
The popularity of manufacturing technology has greatly released the creativity of group wisdom. Future innovation may occur in many small groups. They have enough knowledge, have a very specific understanding of a subdivided problem field, and can design solutions by themselves, so as to solve many detailed problems that cannot be solved by large-scale mass production. All this depends on the cheap and readily available tools and sufficient knowledge reserves.
Before the open source movement, people did not pay serious attention to the problem of knowledge sharing. In the past, there was no reasonable open source form for the release of software. Either it was plagiarized at will after it was published, or it was locked up as private property, which was inaccessible to ordinary people. Even today, there are still various wars of patent protection hindering the popularization of Technology (of course, part of the reason is to protect the interests of developers), But the actual benefits may not be given to the real developers). Professionals are almost gathered in large companies, and their knowledge and experience rarely have the opportunity to be used by others in the society. It was not until someone put forward the open source license that everyone was able to ensure that their projects were released in an open and free sharing manner under the protection of the law. Since then, many people have set up communities or projects in their spare time or even full-time, promoting the development and sharing of public knowledge. Nowadays, we use many open source third-party libraries in enterprise application development, all of which benefit from the development of open source movement.
During the development of the domestic maker movement, the author saw that many people did not understand the meaning of open source, and even had a wrong understanding of open source projects. They thought that as long as they were open source, they could use them freely, and never considered giving feedback to open source projects. It was a great pity. Therefore, this article focuses on the inevitable relationship between maker movement and open source projects.
Ability development of analysis, design and manufacturing
In this era of money worship and consumerism, both at home and abroad, we often see cases where people despise science and professionalism, which is a very dangerous thing. When we talk about innovation, how can we avoid empty talk about ideals, or designing products that do not meet the use, or making low-quality products with poor technology? If we do not pay attention to these problems, it will also cause a huge waste of resources. Everyone is not born with these abilities. In our education system, knowledge education is actually very narrow. When we face practical problems, what we need is the ability to learn knowledge and practical experience to help us analyze problems, design solutions and solve problems.
In the current market, many common problems are solved by enterprises. Talents are gathered in enterprises, and the enterprise culture is closed. They regard the output of employees as the knowledge property of the enterprise and take it as the competitive advantage of the enterprise, which leads to many problem-solving knowledge and experience accumulated in the enterprise, But they can't share this knowledge with the society. With the development of this model, the problem that will arise over time is that the ability to solve problems is inclined to large enterprises, while ordinary individuals or small enterprises are not able to solve these problems, and large enterprises will not take care of the subdivided fields due to the pursuit of market scale.
Why is the foreign maker movement rooted in the spirit of open source and sharing? It is because open source knowledge makes up for the above problems. Look at foreign adafruit.com, constructables.com and hackaday.com. People share various hands-on DIY tutorials. With these complete, detailed and feasible tutorials, many people can try by themselves and gain the same production experience. Imagine if these knowledge are hidden in various enterprises and ordinary people can't learn by themselves. Maybe you can buy various electronic components on Taobao, but you can't find someone to tell you how to use it to make circuit boards. You can find such a tutorial on adafruit.com. When the founder of Arduino developed this open source tool, the purpose was to give those art students who did not have the foundation of science and engineering the opportunity to use electronics to create. If there was no such open source tool and they were driven by commercial companies, it would be difficult to promote the production of electronic prototypes on a large scale and detonate the creativity in the public domain.
Knowledge reserves completed in the form of open source projects
In the szdiy community, we usually work together in the form of open source projects. Due to its openness, it can allow others to participate together. As long as people are interested in the project, they can obtain a relevant information, keep their attention to the project and contribute to the project. Because it is an open knowledge experience, we can easily transfer it to others without any concerns about private property rights.
Many people are quite conservative about their creative inspiration. According to the ideas instilled by predecessors, people with their own ideas should learn to protect their creativity, use it to start a business, introduce investment, and turn an idea into a listed company in the future to realize their life ideals. After starting a business in these two years, the author realized that from an idea to a product, how many details need to be polished, how much experience needs to be accumulated, how many learning costs need to be paid, and how many kinds of crises will push the project to collapse. This is why 90% of start-up companies are doomed to failure. Moreover, because the enterprise is a closed organization, these problems and experiences are difficult to share with others, and everyone can only experience them in the process of their own experience.
However, if our creativity is done in the form of open source projects (Note: it should be noted here that not all creativity is suitable for open source), we can let more people participate, or even complete it in their spare time. In the process of project participation, everyone can obtain this new experience and exercise new skills. For example, in the past, our little Australian partner Mitch Davis took us to do the beer making project. We discussed it in the email group and spent some spare time to make the whole project every week. Finally, everyone can experience the problems in this process and the methods to solve the problems, as well as the beer made by ourselves. In fact, there are many predecessors like Mitch in large companies. They have rich knowledge and experience, but if they never do open source projects, it is difficult to transfer these professional knowledge and skills to others.
For people from different backgrounds in our community, it is a very good opportunity to realize cross-border learning through community projects. Everyone's knowledge has boundaries, but our learning should be boundless. There are many new technologies in your professional field that need to be tried by yourself. Generally, new technologies will not be adopted into work projects because of risks, but you can do many experiments by yourself in the form of amateur and community projects. According to everyone's professional division of labor, participating in community projects can expand their knowledge, understand the thinking and ways of doing things of other professional divisions, and integrate many new inspiration into their work.
Taking the "polascii character Polaroid" project done by the author as an example, its prototype was born in the hack42 maker marathon organized by ourselves. At first, it was just my inspiration. Then I discussed the technology with people in the community. I did some basic technical research in the two days of marathon. In the process of doing this, I constantly balanced the needs of creative intention and the limitations of technology. At the same time, I also deliberately tried some technologies I had never used, and spent more than a month in my spare time, With the help of some tools provided by others, the work can be completed. When the project is completed, the author has understood the feasibility, advantages and disadvantages of the whole technical scheme. These experiences are published online in the form of open source. In the future, other people can come here for reference. When I personally do such things, I have actually completed this part of technical research and practical test for the community, forming the knowledge reserve of the community.
Open source and public knowledge
Nowadays, more and more people use GitHub and stack overflow, and many materials of open source hardware are released in the form of GPL. Technicians have a great demand for information sharing. Why? Because when someone who knows can tell you, a problem that has bothered you for half a month may be solved in five minutes. This is why social coding and technical Q & A websites are websites that programmers often rely on. In the case of open code and data, many people can rely on their own ability to solve the problem at hand when they encounter problems. Similarly, if a software / hardware defect exists, if the data is open, others can help troubleshoot the problem and submit solutions to the author. This does not mean that many people will do so, but when they do, they can reduce the trial and error cost of others and avoid repeated work.
The value of public knowledge base is also reflected in this. There are many times when we need to face the same problems. If everyone has to accumulate from scratch, they have to spend the learning cost again. The open source movement advocates the release of projects in an open source way, so that everyone can better stand on the shoulders of predecessors and do new things. Therefore, everyone who contributes to open source projects will also make their own efforts to be responsible for their own work, so that others can build their work on a solid foundation.
At present, many enterprises generally encounter the problem of finding technicians, which is due to the lack of interaction between the upper and lower levels from the perspective of the knowledge crowd structure of the whole society. Among college graduates, a small number of talented young people have been scraped away by big companies, and most of them have gone to all walks of life in society. Today's technical resources are inclined to large companies. Therefore, most people in society lack the conditions for project training. They are difficult to have the opportunity to train to the threshold of entering large companies. When large companies need to absorb talents, it is difficult to find talents in the majority of society for the same reason. Through open source projects, we can promote the effective interaction between the professional knowledge group at the upper level and the basic people at the lower level. By popularizing professional technical skills, we can also improve the overall knowledge level of most of the lower level.
One of the characteristics of open source projects is that it does not have a very strict deadline like commercial projects. It will not die because the company has no money. Once the source code is opened, it will enter the field of public knowledge and be continued by interested people in the public. It can slowly complete from quantitative change to qualitative change through fragmented accumulation.
In addition, the form of open source projects can also be varied and derived into various fields, because there is the concept of branch in open source projects. Whenever some people who are not satisfied with the original project appear, they can choose to create their own branch on the original basis. For example, Linux operating system will be branched to a version dedicated to scientific research laboratories, You can also branch to the version dedicated to artists, or to mobile terminal systems such as mobile phones and tablets, such as Android we use every day. Even if the individuals or groups originally developed by the project no longer exist or are no longer updated, their previous work achievements and their project genes will continue on these active branches.
Therefore, in the field of maker movement, we need something like open source projects to promote high-end technical resources to the general public, improve the scientific and technological level of the whole society, and accumulate the fragmented mass wisdom through our contribution to open source projects, so that innovation and technology can be spread to every corner and benefit human society.
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