Defining success in open source hardware development projects: a survey of practitioners

Rafaella Antoniou,Daniela Defazio,Jérémy Bonvoisin,Pen-Yuan Hsing,Elies Dekoninck

doi:10.1017/dsj.2021.30

Abstract

Abstract Recent years have seen the rise of citizens as contributors to hardware product creation. This trend has increased attention to open source hardware (OSH): a phenomenon that extends the intellectual property management and development practices in open source software (OSS) into the design of physical objects. OSH projects are different from OSS projects due to product type, and distinct from traditional closed source new product development (NPD) ones due to their openness. These differences challenge the degree of applicability of existing project success definitions in the OSH context. To investigate project success in OSH, we conducted a qualitative survey with practitioners. We report characteristics of successful OSH projects through three identified themes: (a) value creation – the big-picture impact, (b) quality of output – the quality of the hardware and accompanying documentation and (c) project process – activities that contribute to success. We contextualise by comparing OSH with selected literature on the success of OSS and NPD project management. While our study confirms a similarity between OSS and OSH in defining project success, it also highlights themes that are uniquely important to the latter. These findings are helpful for OSH development practice and could provide lessons for OSS development and closed source NPD.

Highlights

In recent years, we have observed a proliferation of open source hardware (OSH) initiatives, with some developing profitable businesses
Comparison of findings with selected relevant literature This section presents a comparison of the results presented in Section 3 with open source software (OSS) literature and new product development (NPD) project management literature
Even though – according to the OSH definition (Open Source Hardware Association 2018) – only product openness is required for hardware to be termed open source, our results identify having process openness to be a characteristic of successful OSH projects

Summary

Introduction

We have observed a proliferation of open source hardware (OSH) initiatives, with some developing profitable businesses. Success criteria can help OSH communities ‘build effective forms of collective action and self-organisation’ and ‘effectively create and capture value’ (Troxler 2013) They can aid in the formation of ‘a consistent identity and a set of commonly accepted best practices’ to help the OSH phenomenon become more mature (Bonvoisin et al 2020). When a product is open source, it means that its users have four freedoms: (a) to use it for any purpose, (b) to study it, (c) to make and redistribute copies of it and (d) to make changes to it and share them (Stallman 2002) The articulation of these fundamental freedoms originated in the early days of software development when developers openly shared source code and built on each other’s work (Stallman 2002). There are many examples of OSS, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser, the WordPress content management system, and the Linux kernel on which many enterprises and mobile operating systems are based

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion