The Blackberry Keyboard: How An Open-Source Ecosystem Sprouts
1 min read
Summary
The author is an advocate for open-sourcing projects in the hardware space to increase innovation and build communities.
They share a story about the Beepy handheld computer, which began as a reverse-engineered Blackberry keyboard and has now grown into a large community and ecosystem with multiple derivative devices.
The journey wasn’t entirely smooth, with some early project founders opting to commercialize their developments, and some legal challenges around trademark usage.
Despite these issues, the author believes that open-sourcing projects can lead to tremendous benefits for the hardware space, and they encourage others to follow suit.
They also touch on some of the limitations of the Beepy platform and the challenges of building a community around it, and conclude by hinting at further developments in the ecosystem that will be covered in a future article.
The article also touches on the limitations of Discord as a community platform and the author’s apparent defense of it as a necessary evil.
