o·brar·y \'oh-brer-ee:
noun
The open library of products; "Let's make this product that we found the design for on Obrary."
Obrary is a marketplace of products collaboratively designed by the community. These products can be produced by anyone, amateur or professional manufacturer, wherever economically or locally practical.
We are inspired by the Open Source world that is so prevalent in the software today, from Linux to Twitter Bootstrap. Tools like Github have made open source software easy for the developer community. In Open Source, the software’s source code is made available to anyone for any use. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software,
“Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose”
We see the same benefits for the world of products. Open access to the source files of designs and the ability to improve or customize those designs will enable the community to accelerate the test/learn/iterate cycle and explore new uses for products.
For us, open also means not being tied to any one company or industry. We are an independent company and not associated with any manufacturers of products. Our solution is available for all types of design and manufacturing. We want to harness and enable Crowd Collaboration - when people get together to create something new or improve on something that already exists.
We chose to use the term Open Design over Open Source Hardware. Those terms are almost synonymous to us, but Open Design is more intuitive since more people understand design to mean design files. What’s more, hardware is not a broad enough term for the products we have in Obrary. For example, a chair is not hardware. Historically, hardware has been used to mean metalware, military equipment, weapons, or computer, mechanical, electronic devices.
We follow the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) which you can see here.
If you use designs from Obrary:
If you submit Open Designs to Obrary:
Creative Commons has easy to understand licenses. Some other licenses have long documents full of legalize that aren’t user friendly. Creative Commons is the now the most popular licenses for hardware and designs, so our hope is that CC will be more easily identified and understood by people. The Creative Commons license is about general IP and is not just for software or technology based hardware.
Obrary was created by Eric and Scott. They provide Obrary as a resource for the community of makers.