Can Consumer Electronics Be Truly Open?

Today, the benefits of open-source (OS) software are clearly established, and many modern software systems build on it. Similarly, the OS movement is also experiencing great advances in areas other than software. This is particularly true in the consumer electronics (CE) domain, where an increasingly growing number of systems are based not only on OS software (OSS), but also on OS hardware (OSH) and OS networking (OSN). This column discusses to what extent it is possible to develop fully OS CE, now or in the near future. The main past and present contributions of OSH and OSN and their relationship with OSS initiatives are reviewed, and the main challenges and opportunities opened up in the context of OS CE are discussed.