iFixit has decided to open all of its repair manuals to the world for general use – a collection which includes 91 Mac models, 34 iPods, and a couple of iPhones!
Frighteningly, they have 154,556 images (including revision history and thumbnails) and over 1,000 step-by-step guides on their servers – so this is no small collection of data we are talking about here.
Effective immediately, we are licensing all iFixit repair manuals under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. To my knowledge, this is the largest free release of repair documentation ever. We are committing to make our repair manuals available to everyone in the world, forever, for free.
We will be providing a XML data dump of our repair manuals sometime in the middle of next year. We are in the process of finalizing a new repair manual XML schema (if you want input on the process, please contact us). We hope to host the data archive at the Internet Archive as well as seed it via BitTorrent.
You might wonder why they are doing this – and their argument is that there is no sustainability in most electronics devices currently, and repairing them is one way to help try and achieve that. Of course, being a parts retailer is where the commercial kickback happens, but still it’s a very noble gesture indeed I think. Well done, iFixit!
You can learn more on the iFixit website here. I’m headed there shortly to check the info on iPhones!