Project update 3 of 7
Sentinel Core is Open Hardware. Here's What That Means to Me
by Pepijn de V
Greetings fellow makers! I’m very happy to have a growing number of you support this project.
I used to be very idealistic about open source, but there are many kinds of open source, and not all of them are created equal.
- There is the shared commons project with several big organizations contributing
- There is the non-profit making something that matters
- There is the commercial source available product
- There is the project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003
- There is the consultancy company founded to support the founders project
- There is the big tech employee who maintains something in their 20% time
- There is the hobby project that's just on GitHub because why not?
Most of my projects, including this one, are in that last category. I just made it because I wanted to. It doesn’t matter much to me if other people use it or contribute to it or steal it or whatever. I had fun making it, and I don’t see a reason not to share it.
That is true for my GPU-enabled Home Assistant fork and my LLM add-on repository, software projects which you’re free to experiment with for your own voice assistant projects.
But hardware is a different beast entirely: You can’t download a car! (And would you?)
My philosophy is still the same though: I had fun making it. The issue is that for you to enjoy my "car" it has to be manufactured, and manufacturing is subject to economies of scale that make individual boards prohibitively expensive. Even smaller crowd-funding runs like this one are a lot more expensive than mass production.
So that’s why I told Crowd Supply: As long as I’m not losing money from this, I’m happy to bring this project to you. And if someone steals the design and sells it for less? Good!
That’s why I’m releasing the full Kicad design files under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Permissive, which as the name implies is a permissive license tailored for hardware projects.
I’m happy to have all of you along on this ride; let’s have fun together playing with Raspberry Pi’s!
