Open Source life, from the ground up

Open Source living.  What does that even mean?  Are people talking about a return to the 19th and early 20th century and the harsh life of homesteading?

The wonderful thing about living an Open Source life is, your Open Source life is up to you.  Certainly, you can move to a farm or live in a tiny house or maintain a minimalist lifestyle.

But that does not have to be the case.  Yes, a purist might suggest that a person must leave all creature comforts behind, move to the country, and put up a two room shack and live off the land.

The reality is, living an Open Source life is something between starting to live slightly different than how you are right now and doing it Amish-style...

We will take a look at the many ways you might look at as you start to live a life that you might just find hugely more fulfilling and gratifying.

I do want to say that I am not a purist.  I respect purists, but feel that the road to "freedom" does not have to mean giving up on the things that we want to have in our lives.  Rather, freedom simply is the ability to have a choice to buy what you want or to build what you want.  Or have someone else build something you want that just happens to be under an open source license.

We can start with the basics, of course, such as a previous article we wrote about Open Source Food.  That article specifically talks about food recipes that are open source or rather, shared under a creative commons license.

A recipe is useless if we can not prepare and cook the food, as appropriate.  Clay pots and pans and peasants knives are certainly a place to start.  One could make those themselves.  And cooking over an open fire in a house is probably not a great idea, although there are Open Source ranges and ovens which range from solar to wood to alternatively acquired electrical sources.

You might have a recipe and a stove, but what about your food?  Well, if you live on a farm, that's probably pretty obvious.  But what if you live in a town?  You are likely to be restricted from raising meat, although that's not always the case.  As far as vegetables, the standard "go to" is a garden.  But for many, gardens are big (an artefact of a time when land was cheap and plentiful), but that isn't always the best method.  Wall, terrace, and pot gardens are very good methods.  What about off season?  Well, green houses can solve that problem, but again, if you don't have the yard for it, that might not be an option.  In that case, you could move the operations into the house with hydroponics.

You say that you actually DO live on an acreage?  Go ahead farmers, laugh.  That's what the urbanites like to call a property of land larger than a 50'x150' plot of land they had in town.  Well, perhaps you don't want to purchase proprietary farm equipment.  There's solutions for that.  I can't even begin to list all the items that the Open Source Ecology group has produced.  From tractors and implements to brick making machines and houses as well as cooking and stoves.  A full complement of open source tools to live an open source life.

Not quite sure about building an Open Source house?  Well there are certainly option to create your own Open Source furniture.  And it doesn't have to look or function horribly.

As far as creature comforts that are more current and information age relevant, there are plenty of open source technologies that one can create using hardware such as arduinos, raspberry pi's, and Rep Rap 3D printers.  Whether it be printing out coat hangers and lamp shades, to programming environmental controls of a house, setting lighting, and even managing  plants.

So you are wondering about your clothing?  Well funny you should ask.  There are people who have created Open Source looms and sewing machines.  And there are people who are working on creating Open Source clothing designs that are not just functional, but stylish, as well.

What else?  Transportation?  Yes, there are Open Source solutions for that.  From human powered vehicles up to state of the art, motorized electric vehicles.  Of course not all the components on these vehicles may be Open Source, plenty of people are working to solve that.  It's a long, tedious process in such a new industry.  The beautiful thing is, people ARE doing it.

As could be imagined and expected, a single article is no where near enough space to just list all the open source items that people can convert to, let alone describe them all.  That is the reason for this web site.  As we are publishing more and more entry level articles that people can think about open source, we are starting to, and will continue to publish more detailed articles about specific Open Source technologies and projects.

And of course, if you can't wait for an article here, just use your favourite search engine to look for an Open Source project that is focused specifically on your interest.