Jerry de Vos: How frustration led to Delft Open Hardware
Channel: The Open Source Hardware Association
Date: 23/04/2022

A presentation from the 2022 Open Hardware Summit.

After pioneering plastic recycling for over a year at Precious Plastic, starting my masters was a cold shower. I was used to working in an open source manner, seeing people work hard because they loved the thing that they did, making impact for good. At the university things were different, all projects belonged to the university, and good project should file for a patent. Not signing the contact would get you unenrolled. This frustrated me a lot, but instead of only yelling it was time for action. Together with some friends we started Delft Open Hardware, a bunch on nerds discussing open hardware projects over lunch every friday. There were personal projects and also occational team efforts. We organized some events to have let others know about our project, and we had an occasional bbq. Things started to change when the university approached us, in the meantime they had developed an open science programme and found our grassroots project that would fit straight in. This allowed us to organize better events, and support projects with resources and knowledge. Since 5 months I am now employed by the TU delft, as a Research Hardware Engineer, supporting students and researcher in making their projects open source!