Hopefully I can provide a bit of insight on this, currently working on open hardware myself. OSHW certification is a self-certification process. Individual pro

Hopefully I can provide a bit of insight on this, currently working on open hardware myself. OSHW certification is a self-certification process. Individual products are certified, not companies. What Torrone is doing is conflating Arduino the company (or foundation, or companies, or whatever it is this week, guys please stahp) and Arduino the product series, and individual Arduino products. He knows what he's doing, but in this email does it anyway. Perhaps for good cause, but it's what he's doing. There is no requirement for Arduino to certify all of it's hardware with OSHWA. In fact given the explosion of things-that-are-branded-arduino it would be unsurprising to see hardware that cannot be certified as open due to commercial agreements that override open licences. Whether this affects Arduino or not long term is a different matter but the Uno, Nano and Pro Mini are all still open. OSHWA is an attempt to define what constitutes Open Source Hardware and to define some (hopefully) sane defaults. It's the hardware equivalent of the FSF, and it's licence is the maker equivalent of the GPL. It is not the only fruit. My project[1] uses the V-USB library, which comes with an open licence[2]. The project is derived from another project, the digispark[3]. We're operating within the licence constraints, and consider our project to be open hardware (we're posting our board designs when we ship at the end of this month). To further complicate things, when Arduino uses the term Open Source it rarely clarifies what that means. It may be referring to the software stack. It might be (but probably isn't in this day and age) referring to new hardware. Either way, while it is right to pressure Arduino to clarify their position, I think it's unfair to mandate that every product they ever produce must comply with OSHWA's definition of Open Source Hardware, or that only OSHWA certified hardware can be considered "open hardware". [1] - https://hidiot.com/ https://hidiot.com/ [2] - https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html [3] - https://digistump.com/ https://digistump.com/