Following an initial collaboration, the Spanish government funded the participation of two private companies. Then, CERN engaged a larger group of companies and organizations to develop the open source hardware, open source software, and various peripheral technologies. These organizations did not expect to generate revenue but participated due to their interest in the resulting knowledge. The result is “a means for ‘distributing clocks’” to ensure that the network shares a common time (with nanosecond scale accuracy)” and is named “White Rabbit” after the unforgettable character in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

Ultimately, White Rabbit did much more than solve the problem of distributed clocks for particle accelerators for CERN. It was integrated into an IEEE standard, resulted in a license for open hardware, and spurred a set of new practices, tools, and protocols for collaboration.

Needing a collaborative legal framework for White Rabbit, and inspired by licenses created in the Amateur Radio Community by the organization Tuscan Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR), CERN developed a set of licenses for open source hardware. The first version of the CERN Open hardware license (CERN OHL) was released in March 2011.

White Rabbit required new practices, tools, and protocols for collaboration, and inspired a wiki and dynamic mailing list: the Open Hardware Repository. The Open Hardware Repository also facilitates community norms via a manifesto that describes how collaboration and exchanges should take place, and furthers community interactions by organizing meetings and workshops.

One such meeting was the hosting of the initial Gathering for Open Science Hardware, which itself serves the needs of the global open science hardware community through convening meetings, publications, activities, and providing a forum.

Far beyond White Rabbit itself, this progress ultimately cemented open hardware as “a means for sharing the load of developing research infrastructures with high degrees of quality control and assurance”.

Beyond open hardware, all of the publications associated with the Large Hadron Collider are published open access, and CERN developed an open data repository, and an open source software package for library management. Through its commitment to open science, CERN exemplifies how collaboration can advance discovery.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: CERN