In the old days it used to be possible to fix problems on an old radio because schematics were released. This could help people a lot with newer technology. Tracing circuit diagrams is easier than reverse engineering software to fix it, but it is still time consuming and hard.
Reverse engineering hardware is a lot harder nowadays (if not even harder than software), it was easy back in the day when all of the componants were though hole and PCBs contained no more than two layers, but nowadays it's nearly impossible to trace an 8 layer PCB, an even after that you have to reverse engineer all the code on all the programmable chips.
Question: are schematics actually licenced?
I don't know, I've seen that some free schematics have conditions attatched to them like not for commercial use and give me credit or provide the origional source but I don't know if these are legally binding.
If they are not then someone could set up a wikipedia like site for releasing traced schematics from hardware to allow people to fix it.
A
forum I visit has a section for people to post service manuals and they're very relaxed when it comes to posting copyrighted material.
I ain't saying that food is simple; I myself looove cooking and experimentation therewith. What I AM saying, OTOH, is that you don't really see the difference between todays breads and those from a few years ago (although European breads differ from American ones et al. - the Europian types are edible 
), there is no simple, linear upgrading.
I see your point here, food is similar to textiles in that respect though progress is being made all the time in farming, manufacture and foods for people on special diets.
OK, I now realise this is quite important - and with this I have finally completed creating my opinion on music and movies as well:
In other words, this is indeed the difference between art and science. Open source seems to work very well with some models. It has always been used in general science and knowledge (Newton, Einstein etc.), recently software and knowledge organisation (wiki), possibly eventually in pharmaceutics, chemistry, hardware. All these areas are scientific, and OBJECTIVE. They have progress, they can be written down.
Within those where this doesn't apply, the OS model cannot be used. These are all artistic, and therefore SUBJECTIVE. They depend closely on their creator (musician, director, chef) and are unimprovable (because this is a matter of opinion), unreproductable (no two instruments, ingredients or actors are the same) and THEREFORE UNCHANGEABLE. The OS model implicitly expects the ability to change the work in question, hence cannot be used here. I am sorry for the uncontiguousness of my post - I am making this up on the go, and I'll try to get it a little more organised later. I hope some of you understand what I mean.
Art can be free too, the Internet is already full of free music pictures and videos.
Software, hardware and pharmaceuticals are totally differant to science. Software isn't science and neither is hardware even though they rely on scientific concepts such as mathematics, physics and chemestry, in fact
they are design and tecnollogy rather than science. Science is discovering things about materials, the world around you and the universe in general, it's more about answering questions rather than designing things even though there is an element of design when it comes to experiments.
Well this doesn't really differ from the OSS model, except that casual contributors can't (yet...?) work from their home PC. The drug companies wouldn't have to spend the money, because it would be a community effort. Hopefully this would result in an overall faster dev cycle, as it does in some OSS areas.
I've never fully believed the arugment that the community will always fix any problems in a product anyway, this simply isn't the case, often open source programs (just like proprietary ones) have old know yet to be squashed.
I don't think this argument can be applied to medicine, drug companies are highly regulated they can't test there products on people until they've gone though many tests (some involving animals) before they even start medical trials. If drugs were to go open source it would be imposible to trace which tests have been carried out on what group of people and gathering the results would be a problem to not to mentioning the safety implications of this, don't for get we're talking about people's lives here not whether some buggy piece of software crashes or not.
