Printers are a common everyday machine. They use ink and technology to make things in 2 dimensions. Imagine if instead of printing on bits of paper, you had a printer that works in 3 dimensions. You would have to use a solid ink, but you would be able to print real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust these parts could be think of Lego bricks and you're in the right ballpark. You could make lots of useful stuff. Interestingly, you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer, but not all of them. That would be a machine which could make itself.

OPENCORES: Mission The need Today, deep submicron (DSM) designs include many millions of gates in a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The number of gates continues to grow, with the result that design times get longer and longer. This can result in excessive time- to-market and excessive cost. The technical solution to the problem is core re-use. This speeds up the design by enabling engineers to cooperate. Currently, cores available for integration are proprietary and must be purchased from established vendors, often at very high prices. These costs can be burdensome, especially for small design teams with limited funding. Proprietary cores are hard to integrate due to the multiplicity of incompatible design and test tools. Usually, proprietary cores lack adequate documentation, and the purchasor does not have access to the source, which makes the task of integration much more difficult, perhaps prohibitively so. Project objective Our main objective is to design and publish core designs under a license for hardware modelled on the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for software. We are committed to the ideal of freely available, freely usable and re-usable open source hardware. Subsidiary objectives We have set the following objectives as the means of reaching our main objective: * Develop standards for open source cores and platforms * Create tools and methods for development of open source cores and platforms * Develop open source cores and platforms * Provide documentation for these cores and platforms

Proprietary data formats may be legally defensible but open standards can be a better spur for innovation.

Opening Up Education The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge Edited by Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar Foreword by John Seely Brown

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).