Maker's Bill of Rights

= An Owner's Manifesto by Mister Jalopy of Make Magazine

URL = http://downloads.oreilly.com/make/MAKERS_RIGHTS.pdf

"If you can't open it, you don't own it: a Maker's Bill of Rights to accessible, extensive, and repairable hardware."

Context

Jeremy Faludi:

"Maker's Bill of Rights to demand hackability in products. Interestingly, the things that make a device hackable are the same things that make a device repairable and upgradeable, so design-for-hacking is also green design." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008550.html)

Text

• Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included.

• Cases shall be easy to open.

• Batteries should be replaceable.

• Special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons.

• Profiting by selling expensive special tools is wrong and not making special tools available is even worse.

• Torx is OK; tamperproof is rarely OK.

• Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable.

• Consumables, like fuses and filters, shall be easy to access.

• Circuit boards shall be commented.

• Power from USB is good; power from proprietary power adapters is bad.

• Standard connecters shall have pinouts defined.

• If it snaps shut, it shall snap open.

• Screws better than glues.

• Docs and drivers shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.

• Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.

• Metric or standard, not both.

• Schematics shall be included."

(http://www.makezine.com/04/ownyourown/)

Commentary

Jeremy Faludi:

"Why is design for hackability the same as design for long lifetime? Because the things a hacker wants to do to a device today (add memory, storage, or faster processing, or peripheral extensions) are the same things required to keep a device from getting obsolete years from now (when it will have to be faster / have more storage / connect to peripheral X, just to stay useable.) Many devices have proven useful long past their original lifetimes--the Beowulf project has used old 486 and Pentium I computers (junk to any modern computer user; obsolete nearly ten years ago) to create "a computer which can operate in the gigaflop range" (better than all but the highest-end personal computers available today).

Design for hackability is also green design because when a device dies, it's usually just one part dying before the rest. How many times have you had the batteries die in a device (which, in most models of Apple's iPod, are not replaceable)? Or had your cell phone's screen break while the phone itself still functioned? When I was in college I worked in computer hardware repair, and often a "dead" machine merely had a bad power supply which could be fixed by replacing a 10-cent resistor, if you knew enough about the machine to determine which resistor was bad. If every product came with schematics and manuals archived in perpetuity, as Make's list suggests, any home user could get this knowledge and potentially save their device from the grave if they're geek enough." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008550.html)