Just like software, hardware can also be free.
You wonder how you can make money from that. Well, just looking at the design won't do anything to your income. But you're free to use any OSHW design in your own products. You don't even have to ask for permission. Is it commonplace? Yes, the vast majority of consumer electronics is based on so-called "reference designs", usually supplied by component manufacturers like AMD, Texas Instruments, Maxim and so on. But they only supply the design, not the physical layout.
With OSHW, things are different. You can share any design, schematic and/or physical. Just like open source software - just use it. Even for commercial products.
If you want to open a text file and have openoffice/libreoffice to use Kichwa as language, you can generate a locale for linux like this (assuming your document is UTF-8):
Use the file qu_EC and generate the locale running:
sudo localedef -i qu_EC -f UTF-8 qu_EC
Now the command
locale -a
should show up a few lines about qu_EC[.utf8]
Then you can run eg. open/libreoffice with inline locale specification:
LANG=qu_EC.utf8 soffice somedocument.txt
and the document will open as UTF-8 with qu_EC as language.
If you try this on Windows, probably nothing will happen. But if something bad happes (cat dies etc), I'm not to blame.
Watchtower Library (Wtlib) and Watchtower Reader (so far only published in 2006) are powerful study tools. Now, us linux-users also want to use it. For the moment, it works very well in most linux distros.
Watchtower Library 2010 on linux
wtlib-friendly fonts for linux
wtlib-scripts for linux
wtlib-icons (GPL assuming fair use
upstream)
Dvorak is (among other things) a keyboard setup to ease and speed typing on a computer keyboard.
Prøv Norsk Dvorak!
My custom dvorak keyboard that eases writing Norwegian, Spanish, French, *NIX ...
If you're an american lawyer, consider stop reading here.
Your patents don't apply in Norway, where this server is situated.
I could even show you a .GIF image and YOU would be the guilty of using patented technology to display it on YOUR computer.
(If you think that's wrong, click here). Sounds silly, and it is. See also the disclaimer on the dead cat above.