Interview: Ask Limor Fried About Open-Source Hardware and Adafruit 139
With her signature pink hair, MIT engineer Limor Fried has become a force in the maker movement. Last year she was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine, and her company, Adafruit Industries, did $10 million in sales. Limor has agreed to take some time away from soldering and running a new company to answer your questions about hardware, electronics, and Adafruit. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Re:My Hero (Score:4, Informative)
I hope I'll live to see a world where that kind of thought doesn't cross anyone's mind upon reading about a successful entrepreneur and engineer.
Re:Are you backing away from Open Source HW? (Score:5, Informative)
hi there, i'm one of the folks who work with limor at adafruit and i'm familiar with this product. this is one of the few products that we had to sign many NDA's in order to develop, so we are not able to open source it as per the agreement(s). for that reason we do not put the OSHW logo on it. we will be doing more with BTLE and for those we will have fully open source designs.
back in 2005... (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't a question, but I wanted to note that Slashdot linked to her work back in January 2005 (the Minty MP3 player -- a DIY MP3 player in an altoids tin) -- before her company existed and had $10M a year in sales:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/05/01/15/1828200/build-your-own-mp3-player [slashdot.org]
That was a real eye-opener for me. I previously had no idea that a hobbyist could make something like that; I figured it was only the domain of giant companies with huge teams of engineers.
Anyhow, I've been playing with microcontrollers ever since. Thank you Limor!