It could be. Check out the Global Village Construction Set - a project to open source designs for all the equipment you and thirty of your closest friends would need to check out of the rat race and live independently off-grid.
What does that even mean? Manufacturing is messy, you have to mess with actual physical stuff, it’s not just bits. Having all the blueprints for a refrigerator is a long way from being able to actually build it economically.
Imo open source doesnt explicitly mean “you can build it yourself”
What it does stand for is that incase of issues it can be looked at and resolved. Be it finding the broken component, or looking at the designs and reporting the fault. Both of which improve the thing that is open sourced.
As an example : the framework laptop. Its partly open source, so in case of issues i could bring it to a repairshop which then can easily look at the designs, and figure the fault.
Or what i did with my home server sbc : get the schematics, figure out a manufactoring fault ( cracked solder on pci lane ), fix it and report it to the manufacturer ( which then investigated if it was a one off or if a solder type change was needed ).In other words, right to repair.
Depending on the angle, yes. If its for repairs, then yes. If its for product (manufactoring) improvements, then no. Im a software developer that often collaborates with other teams of open source software. I report, and sometimes fix, bugs so it improves the overal product for everyone. I wouldnt put that under right to repair, as it has nothing to do with repairing it yourself and more with improving a product for everyone by tackling a problem with the product at the source.
More specifically, I have a generator. It is incased in plastic. It stopped working and it is not designed for large hands. My dad pulled out a generator that is 60 years old and it runs like a charm. Brigs and Stratton motor. Everything is on the outside easy to work on. Why can’t someone reinvent it and make it open source.
At that age, there’s a great chance that the patent filing on that generator is about to become public property.
Corporations have been working hard to make the common person forget that the only reason patents have ever been granted (officially) was to induce inventors to document their designs for future public use.
It’s a big part of why the stuff you can get cheap from China nowadays is often surprisingly good quality, as long as it’s an older, tried and true, technology.
You mean to make a documentation on the design and how to build it from scratch? There is the Open-source hardware community which is doing stuff like that; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware
It’s just a lot of work and much more complicated than open-sourcing software source code. That is - I guess - why so few people do it. On top of it there are not many people who would reuse it because for most people it’s cheaper and good enough to get a modern version from a commercial vendor.
Feasible, yes.
The future? I hope so. We’re nowhere near that yet, with the current economic paradigm focusing on patents and profit.
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For example?
Feasible how? It’s easily physically feasible. It’s not feasible in a capitalistic society though.
