In the late 1990s this page listed the companies taking part in the Open Hardware Certification Program, one of the first organized attempts to put a label on "open" hardware. The list itself is long out of date, and we don't reproduce it. What is still useful is the idea behind it, and how differently the same problem is handled now.
What the program was
The program started around 1997 or 1998 (sources give both years) and was run by volunteers from the free software community. Its target was a practical problem. People writing free operating systems, Linux above all, needed technical documentation to write drivers for network cards, graphics chips, sound cards and other devices. Many manufacturers treated their programming interfaces as secrets, or released them only under non-disclosure agreements, which made it impossible to publish a free driver.
The certification was a deal. A manufacturer promised to make enough documentation available for anyone to write software for a device, and in return could mark qualifying products with an open hardware logo. The affiliate page was the public side of that deal: a list of the companies that had signed up, so buyers and developers could see who had committed. Certification was self-declared. The program didn't test products. It relied on the public promise and on the community noticing if a company broke it.
Two things are easy to misread today. First, "open hardware" here meant open documentation of the interface, not open circuit designs. A certified card could have a completely closed schematic and board layout. Second, the logo said nothing about licensing, because no hardware licenses existed yet.
Why it faded
The program never grew into a lasting standard. It depended on volunteers, the incentive for manufacturers was modest, and the market moved on. Over the following decade more vendors began to publish documentation or contribute drivers directly to the Linux kernel, while others kept their interfaces closed regardless of any logo. The term "open hardware" also shifted toward the idea that drives this site: publishing the design itself, so anyone can study, modify, make and sell it.
Our short history of open hardware places the program among the other projects of those years, from open circuit design sites to early drafts of a definition.
How openness is certified today
The best-known scheme now is the certification run by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), a US nonprofit. It launched in October 2016. A project's creator states that it meets the Open Source Hardware Definition: the design files are published in editable formats, under open licenses, with a bill of materials and instructions. Approved projects get a unique identifier made of a country code and a number, a listing in a public directory, and the right to use the certification logo. Registration is free.
The structure echoes the old program, with self-certification, a public list and a logo, but the content is very different:
- It covers the whole design, not just a driver interface.
- It certifies individual projects and versions, never companies. There's no such thing as a certified manufacturer.
- It requires open licenses for hardware, software and documentation, a point the 1990s program could not address.
- It is backed by a certification mark agreement, so misuse of the logo has legal consequences.
Our guide to OSHWA certification walks through the requirements and the application step by step.
Other ways to show a design is open
Certification isn't the only signal. A recognized license is the foundation: CERN-OHL v2, Solderpad and the TAPR OHL were all written for hardware, and the licenses page compares them. Complete public files matter more than any badge, and a good publishing workflow gets you most of the way to certification anyway.
A few narrower schemes exist too. The Free Software Foundation's Respects Your Freedom program, started in 2012, certifies devices on the software side: everything they run must be free software. In Germany, the DIN SPEC 3105 specification, published in 2020, sets out what open source hardware documentation should contain and describes a community review process for checking it.
What to take from the old program
The 1990s program got one thing right that still holds: "open" on a box is easy to claim and hard to check, and a public commitment that others can verify is worth more than marketing copy. If you make hardware, publish the files, pick a hardware license, and register the project if you want the logo. If you buy hardware, look for the files and the license first, and treat any badge as a pointer to them.