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Concept
Open-source appropriate technology
Summary
Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) is appropriate technology developed through the principles of the open-design movement. Appropriate technology is technology designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic aspects of the community it is intended for. Open design is public and licensed to allow it to be used, modified and distributed freely.
Open source is a development method for appropriate technology that utilizes distributed peer review and transparency of process.
Open-source-appropriate technology has potential to drive applied sustainability. The built-in continuous peer-review can result in better quality, higher reliability, and more flexibility than conventional design/patenting of technologies. The free nature of the knowledge provides lower costs, particularly for those technologies that benefit little from scale of manufacture. Finally, OSAT enables the end to predatory intellectual property lock-in. This is particularly important for relieving suffering and saving lives in the developing world.
In an article published on Harvard Business Review, Vasilis Kostakis and Andreas Roos argue that the "open-source" model can act as a driver of sustainable development, since it enables localization for communities that do not have the resources to tempt commercial developers to provide local versions of their products, thus minimizing the need to ship materials over long distances and organizing material activities accordingly. Local manufacturing would also make maintenance easier and encourage manufacturers to design products to last as long as possible. The technology can be both "gratis" and "libre", i.e., free of both the monetary cost and contractual restrictions often associated with commercial technologies and patents. That freedom can be an important consideration for developing communities. According to the lateral scaling concepts of Jeremy Rifkin, it thus optimizes the sharing of knowledge and design as there are no patent costs to pay for.
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