Andrew Katz
Joint Managing Partner
Moorcrofts
Open Hardware – The Next Open Revolution?
Open Hardware
Wednesday February 8th, 10:40am – 11:20am GMT
Burton/Redgrave, 2nd Floor
Open Hardware – The Next Open Revolution?
Open Hardware – The Next Open Revolution?
Open Hardware has long lagged behind free and open source software in terms of development, adoption, community engagement and financial impact. The last few years have seen a sea change with projects such as RISC-V catapult open source silicon into the mainstream, with the parallel increase in interest in open hardware for commodity microcontrollers, COVID-driven medical and clinical items such as ventilators, respirators and PPE, the development of open source hardware for open science, and even the deployment of open hardware within datacentres. Why has this happened, what does open hardware have in common with open source software, and how does it differ? Andrew Katz bring us up to speed with the state of open hardware, how it can offer huge benefits in terms of speed of development, community dynamics, and sustainability and how challenges such as manufacture, distribution and deployment are being addressed. Current issues include managing risk and liability for developers, how open hardware business models can be developed which address issues in regulated sectors such as medical devices and automotive, and how the development cycle can be harnessed to provide maximum benefit for community participants.
Bio
Andrew Katz is a lawyer who has advised on free and open source software, open hardware and other opens for over 25 years. Formerly a software developer, he qualified as a barrister, requalified as a solicitor and is now partner and head of technology law at Moorcrofts LLP, a boutique firm specialising in corporate and technology law. He wrote the Solderpad open hardware licence, and sits on the core drafting team of the CERN Open Hardware Licence. He was Open Hardware lead for the 2021 European Commission study on Open Source Software and Hardware. He has taught a postgraduate Open Source Software law course at Queen Mary College, University of London, and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Skövde, Sweden, where as part of the Software Systems Research Group he has co-authored papers on open source software, open technologies, interoperability, patent licensing and standards. He is co-author of books published by Oxford University Press, Edinburgh University Press and others. He speaks internationally, most recently delivering a keynote at the Open Compliance Summit in Japan (December 2022). He is chair of the OpenChain UK work group, past General Counsel of OpenUK, and has worked with multinational companies, governments, universities and open source foundations, as well as organisations such as the UN and WIPO.