Open Hardware, Repairable Devices, and the Right to Keep What You Bought

Spotify killed the Car Thing and refunded no one. Google ended support for the first and second gen of Nest thermostats. Amazon Kindles swaps your book covers without your permission. When the company walks away, the hardware you paid for stops being yours. This talk looks at how we got here, from sealed phone backs to glued batteries, and at what works against it: open hardware, repairable design, and communities that revive dead devices. I’ll cover what open hardware means (a set of design principles and licensing practices, not a type of object), which devices are repairable today, and what’s at stake in the fight over modding, jailbreaking and 3D printing.

• A clear definition of open hardware and where to find it

• How to judge a device’s repair-ability before buying

• Real examples of dead devices revived by the community, and how to get involved