Makers and open source

The thing is that while the initial design is important, implementing that design (production) is also important. There are a lot of people who are creative designers, but their designs are not easy to manufacture. A person who can tweak the design to be easier (cheaper) to manufacture is adding a lot of value to the design.

Just because you are a designer (or a programmer who has written an app and uploaded it to a major app store) doesn't mean that someone else can't look at what you've done and make a business out of it when you can't. It doesn't always even require sharing the design documents, most things could be reverse engineered by examining a completed machine (although having access to the design docs does make it easier).

So back to the example, if Joe is loosing money on what he's selling, he's doing it wrong. Yes, there may be a minimum number that needs to be sold, but that's what things like kickstarter are great for. If Joe publishes his design, Bill has to start planning the manufacturing process after Joe has built and sold some (to prove that it's a good design). If Joe can't sell the rest of his first production run to break even before Bill does all his planning, builds his copies, and markets them, then Joe has failed the marketing/sales side of business.

You don't have a right to make a profit, you do have a right to try and make a profit.

Part of the problem we are seeing in the Maker space is that companies that got a lot of community support because they were open, are going to loose it (with a backlash) as they try and close things. In some cases (I'm thinking of makerbot that you can now buy from Home Depot) they may survive for a good while, but loosing the grass roots is going to hurt you eventually.

In the software space we have seen this many times over, companies start off targeting home users and grow larger and move into the "enterprise" space, decide that the home users aren't really what they want to support, and then several years later are surprised with their replacement among the home users starts to threaten their enterprise income.