System76 is now a couple years into manufacturing open source hardware, with our efforts expanding in the form of an open source keyboard. In this week’s blog post, we sat down with System76 CEO Carl Richell to discuss the company’s journey into open source hardware and where its future may lead.

What is open source hardware?

Carl: From a broader lens, to produce “open source hardware” means that we have developed and shared the recipe to create a high-end commercial product that can be learned from, adapted, and used by anyone else. In the same way we’ve stood on the shoulders of the Linux and open source software giants who came before us, we now get to be pioneers in developing open source hardware for those who come next. If you want to learn more how a computer is designed or how something is made, our schematics are the instructions for how to do it. It describes every step of the process, from each piece of the machine and its dimensions, to the type of aluminum used and how to bend it.

It’s similar to open source software in that you can learn from the product, adapt it to your needs, and distribute it. The difference is that it requires outside equipment to produce your own version. Open hardware has become more accessible with 3-D printing, but as we found when we were making acrylic prototypes of Thelio, you reach a point where it’s time to work with metal, which presents its own challenges. You have to cut it, bend it, and paint it, all of which requires specific equipment.

We’ve also laid the ground work for the supply chain, in that anyone can use the same vendors for the fans or the same specs for how long the cables are. All those small yet extremely important pieces are open source.

How does open hardware fall into the System76 philosophy?

The phrase “intellectual property” gets thrown around a lot. It is my opinion, and the opinion that we express in this company, that intellectual property is a false idea. That nothing was just born out of nothing in your mind and just becomes your property. All these things you came up with, someone else was part of the building blocks for you to get there in the first place. And so you can’t own it. You can’t have it. It’s not yours. Like that hinge you’re making, well you’ve had some good ideas, you’ve tinkered with it for a while, you’ve figured out a cool hinge. But I guarantee you’ve looked at every other hinge out there and learned a lot from that research, just as we’ve done with everything we’ve ever built.

The world is full of smart, incredible people, and these ideas are mostly locked up in institutions and companies through the desire to maintain power and control over them. This is a broader idea we don’t believe in. Instead, we believe that ideas are free; that there is no such thing as “intellectual property”.

Why does System76 use copyrights for its hardware?

The reason we use copyright is because reputation matters. Our reputation is our name, it’s who we are, it’s how people perceive our value and the value that we put into something as individuals and as a company. You can’t just slap System76 on everything and say it’s a System76, because we have a reputation that we maintain through the product we deliver. But everything about that product is owned by the user just as much as it’s owned by us. Those beliefs and ideas that exist within open source software are no different than with open source hardware.

Speaking of open source, if there’s anything that should be open source, it’s a vaccine for COVID-19. There’s no lack of supply or resources to produce a vaccine, yet people are hiding secrets from each other to win a race for money. It’s absurd! We’re the ones paying for it. It should be a completely open source effort. I have quite a bit of confidence that the scientists and others working on a vaccine are in it because they really care about the science and getting results. That’s a striking example of where open source would make a lot of sense.

What would you say to someone who is interested in building machines, but is worried that making them open hardware would negatively impact their business?

There’s a risk if you build anything that is a commodity. When your product is a commodity, it doesn’t take a significant amount of effort to make it unique in the marketplace. It’ll just be copied by someone who can make it cheaper, with cheaper labor. With open hardware, what you want is for your product to be innovative and constantly progressing so that you’ll always be the best deliverer of that product. I think we’ll always be the best deliverer of the Thelio desktop product line—even if we’re not, I’m okay with it. The purpose of he GPL license is to lift all boats. If someone else comes along and does something innovative with our designs, the tide has risen.

We built Thelio Io, which is an open source hardware PCB (printed circuit board). It’s a commodity, but it’s one component of the entire system. You could take this to a manufacturer and have them make it, and then you have a 4-slot backplane that you can use in your design. That means you have the recipe for an open source backplane, controller, firmware, and software thermal system. Now Thelio Io is available on another company’s system because they can use our work? That’s fantastic! If they adopt the same philosophy, something they do in the future would be available for us to use as well.

What it really boils down to is, it doesn’t matter if your product is proprietary or open source; if people like it and it gets highly adopted, it will just be made by someone else. By making it open source, maybe their path is a little faster, but with reverse engineering and how quick product development is these days, it doesn’t seem to matter. You have to disarm at some point, you know? And somebody has to take the lead disarming. We have nukes and they have nukes, so nobody gets rid of their nukes, because that’s our leverage. We’re saying we don’t want this leverage anymore. We want to lead by example. We’re going to disarm and give away the instructions for how to make what we make.

Want to learn more about our open source efforts? Check out the software and firmware installments of our Open Up series.