Open-source hardware (OSH), consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) as well as open-source hardware is created by this open-source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. It is sometimes, thus, referred to as FOSH (free and open-source hardware). The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned so that others can make it - coupling it closely to the maker movement

[1] Hardware design (i.e. mechanical drawings, schematics, bills of material, PCB layout data, HDL source code 

[2] and integrated circuit layout data, in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released under free/libre terms.

The original sharer gains feedback and potentially improvements \\r\\non the design from the FOSH community. There is now significant evidence that such sharing can drive a high return on investment for investors.

[3]  Since the rise of reconfigurable programmable logic devices, sharing of logic designs has been a form of open-source hardware. Instead of the schematics, hardware description language (HDL) code is shared. HDL descriptions are commonly used to set up system-on-a-chip systems either in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) or directly in application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs. HDL modules, when distributed, are called semiconductor intellectual property cores, or IP cores.