In the heavy infrastructure/manufacturing sector it sorta is already. Or maybe I should say it’s pretty easy to reverse engineer at least to a given point. You might not know exactly what is going on in the firmware level of your PLC but you know exactly what PLC to buy and can see the user domain code running on it.
The thing is unless you are doing system integration or repair there isn’t much use for that knowledge.
I think that is quite a different thing no? Those are standard vs open source implementation. Standards make sure we can interop and we can have some high level assumptions/expectations about something. But open source means we also know HOW does it fulfill the standard. A calculator can perform the operation 1 × 4 just fine, but we won’t know HOW it does that. It could be that they have a dedicated circuitry for it or its using the addition circuitry with a parameterized loop.
No it’s more than that. When I rip apart s machine I know exactly where to buy each part in it, I usually have the schematic. Any given part breaks and I can fix it
Hmmm, I think that depends very much on the license of the schematic then. Can you share the schematic? Is it in editable form? Yes? Then it is open source, if not then it still is not open source. I think there is a lot to argue about in open sourceness of hardware. And I’m not really qualified to make such an argument, but folks at OpenHardware have IMHO a decent opinion on it.
I feel like you just asked me if a chopstick is a fork. My clients ask me for it and I email them the PDF, I ssk other companies sometimes and they email me the PDF. What license is that?
For hardware, there is a difference between knowing the schematics and actually editing the schematics. You can have all the schematics you want, but when you try to modify it to suit your needs you need to either remake the schematic or if the original file is shared, edit that instead. As I said, this is my opinion and the ease of modification is generally also part of open source. For a simple part, yes it is possible to remake it. But a complex assembly requires significant effort. Say a roller needs to be spaced a certain amount. You may want to tweak those distances. Before you manufacture it, you check what parts need to be changed to accommodate for your modification too.