Qi hardware

Qi Hardware Inc.

Type	Public
Industry	Computer hardware Computer software Consumer electronics Digital distribution
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, U.S.
Number of locations	Beijing, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Taipei
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Products list Ben Nanonote Milkymist

Qi hardware is a project which produces copyleft hardware, in an attempt to apply the Free Software Foundation's GNU GPL concept of copylefting software to the hardware layer. The project is both a community of popular open hardware websites and a company, co-founded by Wolfgang Spraul and Yi Zhang, that makes hardware products. Originally formed from the ashes of the Openmoko project, several key members formed Qi Hardware Inc and Sharism At Work Ltd. Thus far, the project has released the Ben Nanonote, the Milkymist One, and the Ben WPAN wireless project to create a copyleft wireless platform.

Copyleft hardware is essentially requiring that all plans for hardware design (i.e.schematics, bill of materials and PCB layout data) are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license and that the software needed to both manufacture the device and at least some software, including device drivers, necessary to use the hardware is released under the GNU General Public License. Technology for copyleft hardware are to be patent-free, and hence, all hardware which is Qi hardware is to be released early, often and publicly on the Internet.

The primary examples of Qi hardware projects are the Ben NanoNote pocket computer, Elphel 353 video camera and Milkymist One video synthesizer.