“Open source software has been a well known idea, and something
of a success, for decades, open source hardware is relatively new.
You can say that open source hardware was born out the of the
“maker” movement, but for such an obvious idea it has been slow to
take off. The one big notable exception being the Arduino.“In an effort to popularize the open hardware movement we now
have the Open Hardware Journal starting with November 1, 2011 Issue
1. As it says on the cover page you are free to read it, copy it
and redistribute it – as long as you don’t charge a fee, of
course…”