Why is this an open source windmill? How is this an open source windmill? And, most important of all, what is open source?

I’ve classified this windmill project as open source based on the Wikipedia definition(s): products whose sources or design documents are open for use, modification and redistribution and a radically transparent procedure or process. I intend to make documentation and information related to the windmill available for download here, regardless of whether anyone is interested or not.

For every popular open source project (say, Linux) there are thousands of projects which never get used by anyone. Open source is not a popularity contenst, it’s about opening up information to the world, allowing others to learn from your mistakes, and perhaps even allowing them to help you avoid those mistakes in the first place.

The idea isn’t to get architects and engineers and interior designers to give away their ideas for free (although more open source information is always welcome!), but to foster the culture of share and share alike that helped build the Internet in the first place. If more offline projects would adopt this approach, the world could only become a better place.

This project is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Open Source Windmill
An open source project to renovate a windmill in the Flanders region of Belgium.

Anton Raath

Update: For now, I’ve dropped the “open source” part. There’s not that much to open source, and what there is I post on the site anyway. And building blogs (or renovations blogs, if you don’t subscribe to alliteration) abound the Net, so there’s nothing particularly big or clever about this one.

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