User:Jpotvin

Hello, I lead The Opman Company (opman = operations management) http://opmancompany.ca and have just returned to the private sector after working the past dozen years as the founding Coordinator of Intellectual Resources Canada http://www.ircan.gc.ca in the Canadian Government. Informally, during that time I've also been the founding Co-Coordinator of GOSLING http://www.goslingcommunity.org. That 10-year trajectory is traced here: http://opmancompany.ca/projects/g2g-oao

I'm an economist (HonBA McGill '83; M.Phil Cambridge '86), and besides free/libre/open business models for software I also work professionally on applied and theoretical integration of finance and economics with ecosystem science and resources engineering.

My thoughts on software are summed up in this co-authored paper: http://ircan-rican.gc.ca/attachments/1453/What_is_Software_4nov09PDF.pdf A structure for comparing various free/libre/open source software licenses appears in Chapter 4 of this 2012 book: http://www.irwinlaw.com/store/product/691/knowledge-policy-for-the-21st-century--a-legal-perspective (This chapter is also available here: http://ircan-rican.gc.ca/attachments/1451/KP21_04_Potvin.pdf and a colour version of the visual framework appears on page 16 of this file: http://ircan-rican.gc.ca/attachments/165/IRCan_Overview_BusinessPurpose_e_22mar2010PDF.pdf )

I'm starting a "friendly fork" of the OSHW Definition here because, currently engaged in writing a free/libre/open hardware project proposal to a set of potential clients who are not at all familiar with the whole genre of free/libre/open approaches, I feel the current OSHW Definition is not concise enough to just reproduce as an excerpt. I also feel the current OSHW Definition risks the same division between "open source" methods and "free" ethics that have complicated relations for years within the free/libre/open source software community. Back in 2004 while preparing a presentation deck for my Director General in government, I needed to cram the OSI definition into a single screen: http://www.goslingcommunity.org/gtec2004.shtml In the end I felt the short version I had adapted was more useful as a definition than the original, in the same sense that dictionaries also hold to very concise phrases. Over the years too, I came to see the importance of including both the methods and ethics elements into projects. So what appears here as a "fork" to facilitate discussion is the current draft text that appears in my own free/libre/open hardware document. /Free-Libre-Open Hardware Definition

Meanwhile, let me add that I've long been a fan of the Right to Repair http://www.righttorepair.org and until spring 2012 I held onto my 1980 Volvo 240 precisely because it was de facto open hardware, complete with an active hacker community and several excellent parts caches, like http://www.vlvworld.com and http://www.wix.com/europartscars/europarts#!about-us. But in the past couple years it's become too hard to find specific parts for this particular transportation device in a timely way, so I gave it as a parts cache to my favourite 240 Volvo hacker. And my next car's a train: www.letsgomoose.com.