Openness assessment of 132 open source hardware products

This is the raw data set on which the article "What is the source of open source hardware?" to be published in the Journal of Open Hardware under an open access license is based. The abstract of the article is as follows: "What “open source” means once applied to tangible products has been so far exclusively addressed through the light of licensing. While this approach is adapted for software, it appears to be over-simplistic for complex hardware products. Whether such a product can be labelled as open source is not only a question of license but also a question of documentation, i.e. what is the information that sufficiently describes it? In other words, what is the “source” of open source hardware? To date there is no trivial answer to this question, leaving large room for interpretation in the usage of the term. Based on analysis of public documentation of 132 products, this paper provides an overview of how practitioners tend to interpret the concept of open source hardware. Results empirically confirm the existence of two main usages of the open source principles in the context of tangible products: publication of product-related documentation as a means to support community-based product development and to disseminate privately developed innovations. It also underlines the high variety of interpretations and even misuses of the concept of open source hardware. This reveals in turn that this concept may not even be clear to practitioners and calls for more narrowed down definitions of what has to be shared for a product to be called open source. Results gained by the analysis of current publication practice are summarized in the definition of an open source hardware lifecycle to contribute towards this effort."

本数据集为拟发表于《开放硬件杂志》并采用开放获取许可的论文《开源硬件的源头何在？》所依据的原始数据集。论文摘要如下：当“开源”一词被应用于有形产品时，迄今为止，其含义的阐释主要依赖于许可制度。虽然此方法适用于软件领域，但对于复杂的硬件产品而言，似乎过于简化。一个产品是否可以被标记为开源，不仅是一个关于许可的问题，也是一个关于文档的问题，即描述该产品的信息是什么？换句话说，开源硬件的“源头”是什么？迄今为止，对这一问题尚无简单答案，为“开源”一词的使用留下了广泛的解释空间。基于对132个产品公开文档的分析，本文概述了从业者如何倾向于诠释开源硬件的概念。实证结果表明，在有形产品的背景下，开源原则存在两种主要的使用方式：通过发布与产品相关的文档，作为支持基于社区的产品设计开发和传播私有创新的一种手段。同时，本文强调了开源硬件概念解释的多样性和甚至误用现象。这反过来又揭示了，这一概念可能连从业者都未必清晰，并呼吁对产品被称为开源所需共享的内容进行更为明确的定义。通过对当前出版实践的分析所获得的结果，本文总结了开源硬件生命周期定义，以期为这一努力贡献力量。