Open Design Guns

Description

Eric Larkin:

"At first glance, it would appear that Arduino stands alone as a model for open-source hardware design, but there are other markets where mass-produced, open-design hardware has succeeded, and even dominated. For instance, the M1911 pistol—the classic “Colt 45”—has been produced world-wide using an open design for decades. Similarly, the AK-47 submachine gun was designed in Russia, but is now produced world-wide from readily available specifications.

The success of the open-design model in the gun market is informative. For better or worse, guns are in wide demand all over the world, and if you looked at other markets where there is global demand for a high-value product—like high-tech electronics—you might expect the gun market to be dominated by a few global suppliers of proprietary products who achieve tremendous economies of scale (think of Apple, or IBM, or Cisco in electronics). Two characteristics make the gun market special: an overriding need for standardization, and support for local manufacturers who are too small to develop proprietary designs. Standardization is required because guns have to be compatible with a standardized component—ammunition—and because armies want to minimize their training costs. And nation-states have a very strong interest in supporting a “local” gun industry because they generally don’t want to rely on others for their guns.

Other than guns, there are examples of successful open designs in the form of standards-based products in some commodity functions—like plumbing—where there is relatively little opportunity for innovation, and where the market demands a standardized device that just works in existing infrastructure. When a market relies on mechanical interchangeability of simple hardware in a very large installed base, the benefits of open-design outweigh the benefits of proprietary solutions." (http://www.arenasolutions.com/blog/post/open-design-hardware-manufacturing)