SparkFun: Why Open Source?

Over the past few years, SparkFun has had some amazing success. And that’s due in no small amount to the idea of open source. How so? Through extremely careful and considered planning… Yeah, that’s a lie. We were carried by a tide. Make no mistake; we were exactly where we wanted to be. We just had no idea how big the tide would be.

Early on, we used to just post source code for some of our products. And we resisted this, not because we wanted to hold on to our IP, but because we thought that anyone who saw our code would be appalled. But our thinking was, if we’ve jacked up the code somehow, the least we can do is provide it to somebody else so they can have a whack at it, right? Assume that on the night before a crucial lab you’re trying to get something working and there is a problem with something in our module. We are then essentially responsible. The very least we can do is give you a crowbar to pry yourself out with.

Next came schematics. Anyone who has worked with a large company’s development board knows how vital schematics are, so these really are a no-brainer. You don’t keep the shop manual from the guy that just bought your car.

Then came Gerbers. Wha…? Why would anyone need these? Are they really going to go to the trouble to make their own board? It turns out they might. And what were we saving, really? We were still amateurs at this. They’re simple two-layer layouts, and our breakout boards are almost always the application circuit in the part data sheet. We’re already providing everything else, why not these, too?

But honestly, if people are savvy enough to take our designs and make their own boards, they’re likely savvy enough to improve upon our work. We can’t really fault them for that. They did our job better than we did. So now we emulate them as they emulated us, rolling their improvements into our own design and trying to improve further. We share attribution, everybody’s got a better product making the customer happier, and we improve the species just a little bit. Therein lies the essence of open source.

So it made sense to us from both a practical and ethical standpoint; we wanted to be more useful to the customer than not, and being forthcoming with all of our materials seemed a simple and obvious thing. But it turned out to make practical business sense, too. We’ve never had to worry about IP or patents, or, for the most part, lawyers (I hear Qualcomm spends a bit of time chasing down patent infringements). We just want to focus on what we love to do: build stuff with our toys and share our love of electronics with others. Being open source allowed us to be closer to that ideal, and further away from what might be considered “business norm.” And it turns out that there are a lot of people out there that feel as we do.

Figure 1  SparkFun’s Production Department

However, I recently saw a presentation by a young gentleman (and I have to be careful here because I don’t want to out him) that impressed me. At my behest some weeks earlier, he had created an online tutorial for some work he had done in an effort to attract more people to his particular pursuit. He mentioned this in his presentation, and then lamented having potentially given a leg-up to his competition. But the pursuit happens to be a highly dangerous one, and doing this particular task incorrectly could ultimately result in someone’s death. That’s a lot more responsibility than I referred to earlier, and I’d certainly rather be faulted for giving someone too much information than too little in such a situation.

Fortunately for us, it’s pretty hard to kill yourself with low-voltage electronics. Saving someone’s life isn’t necessarily one of our motives, but the reasoning is more-or-less the same. If you’re going to trust us to buy our products, we’re going to do as much as we can to ensure your success. Being open source is the natural extension of that. It’s not the new logo, nor the protections, nor the notoriety that seems to accompany the title that attracts us to open source. It’s the mentality behind the choice to be so, and that’s something that pervades our group from the top to the bottom. And I think it’s something from which a lot of companies could benefit.