Today takes place the first edition of Hardware Freedom day, a global celebration of hacking and DIY, powered by the Digital Freedom Foundation.

I discovered the existence of Hardware Freedom Day during Document Freedom Day, on which they published a news item supporting the campaign. The same foundation is organising a Culture Freedom Day in May.

Culture Freedom, Hardware Freedom, Document Freedom and Free Software: links between those movements are harder to find than I expected. Firstly because they are far from being unified, and then because they are dealing with things of very different nature. Materiality of hardware changes the way it can be approached, while culture -but what is culture?- standards and software may have the common point of being mostly immaterial. We should handle analogies between information in digital form and physical goods with care, it doesn’t work the same way.

Rejection of the concept of intellectual property seems to be a common ground of those movements. They all insist on the freedoms to use, study, share, and improve on the work of others.

Because this subject is new to me and complex, I will only focus on Hardware Freedom and Software Freedom, culture being a completely different topic.

According  to the Open Source Hardware Association, companies having a business model based on Open Hardware are flourishing everywhere and growing  fast, with Open Hardware being “tangible artifacts — machines, devices,  or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public  in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things”

Sharing design boosts innovation, each developer adding a penny to the existing work. Open 3D printers allow flexible, small scale local production of some goods, and  thus better economic efficiency.

The main difference between hardware and software is obviously that hardware cannot be copied at no cost. If cheap 3D printers may tend to change this  fact, producing one or 10000 copies of a piece of hardware are two very different things, while it makes no difference in the software realm.  Thus comes a need for more money, not only to pay for work but also for raw materials and machines, and time to copy.

As has been repeated over and over, Free Software is a lot more than a business model that favours innovation by allowing knowledge to be shared. It does, but it also grants other freedoms to users, freedoms that are politically very meaningful.

A piece of software does not act on its own will -yet- but according to the will of the people who wrote it or who control it. May it be users, IT companies or anyone else. Free Software allows us to regain control over technology we are depend on, because machines themselves are controlled by software.

The Free Software philosophy is about innovation, efficiency, empowerment and ethics, while, if I understood correctly, Open Source Software is mostly about the first two terms.

Will we see such a difference in the hardware domain?

Society as a whole can probably benefit from the economic efficiency open innovation allows, but it doesn’t sound to me as an argument strong enough to  blindly endorse a technical revolution. What could Free Hardware do for ethics? Decentralising goods production, making people less dependent on specific companies? My flatmate recently had to order a very tiny piece of plastic from the other side of the planet to fix his radio-controlled helicopter, while he could had produced it locally given that the design was available. Here we can find ecological advantages I guess.. And technological empowerment of users.

Still,  it’s quite far from what brought me to Free Software’s.

To be powerful, a political movement needs to be focused and consistent, with a few claims clearly expressed. For Free Software, FSF, FSFE and other sister organisations provide a set of principles that are widely followed. Having the “Free Software philosophy” evolving and spreading in different areas may strengthen it, as new people may have their first contact with it through calls for Free Culture or Open Hardware. Or it may make it fuzzy and less powerful.

According to the Hardware Freedom Day team, hardware design that have to be released include “drawings, blueprints, software code that may be running in the device or used to generate some of its parts or drivers and any other information one could need to create that device itself”.

Finding the right political strategy somewhere between scattering and marginalisation is hard. For now, I think it is safe for a Free Software activist to, at least, contribute raising awareness about the importance of free firmware and free drivers by supporting campaigns like Hardware Freedom Day and insisting on some or their software-related aspects.

So, Happy Hardware Freedom Day!