Makers and open source

Posted Feb 28, 2015 13:53 UTC (Sat) by HIGHGuY (subscriber, #62277)
In reply to: Makers and open source by ortalo
Parent article: Makers and open source

In my opinion, the right thing to do is to decouple design and productizing.

Joe designs something and is the first to do so. He takes the hurdles required to productize it and sell his items. Since the design is open, he and others can and will improve it.

When Bill takes his design and productizes it, Joe needs to make a decision:
Stop productizing and leave that task up to Bill (effectively ceasing all non-design work and probably stop designing for money). Or he can minimize the design work to adding value in small increments and focus on productizing and competing with Bill.

He should not go full length to do _all_ design and _all_ productization. Design costs a lot of money if you need to pay people for it. When under external pressure by someone who took your design, you have to choose what to focus on.

As some may have understood from this example, it is crucial that the design carries an appropriate license where Bill's changes can flow back to the original design. For example GPL for the 'non-virtual' world.

I believe there's a big opportunity out there to connect ideas with people good at productizing. A website where people can sell ideas for a fixed fee or percentage of the profit could probably boom quite fast. This could bridge the gap somewhat for issues like this.

Luckily, however, the maker movement has the opportunity to make building material ideas a lot cheaper.

Makers and open source

Posted Feb 28, 2015 23:04 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

'selling' rights to manufacture things isn't compatible with Open Source principals, let along Free Software principals. Designers can do this today, without any need for help from anyone else.

The thing that we want to see is to encourage designers to let other people use and improve their design (and let the original designer then build on the improvements).

The perception is that if someone builds a copy or improved design, they are 'stealing' from the original designer.

So how do we either change this perception so that it's accepted that people can sell improved versions of something, or figure out how to allow enough sharing of the designs to see improvements while still compensating the original designer?

The problem with trying to 'pay the designer' is how are you going to figure out who and how much to pay to all the people who contribute to a design. Unlike software where you can directly apply patches to the source code, you can't send patches for CAD files. You can design a modification to a part, or come up with a new method of manufacturing something (which could be as 'simple' as re-ordering the operations involved), but these changes can't be distributed as easy-to-attribute patches. The value of the different changes is also hard to determine, sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest differences in manufacturing costs.

Think of the mess that there would be if RedHat had to take 1% of the sale price of it's products and distribute it 'fairly' to the programmers who wrote the code that it's shipping. The 1% wouldn't kill the business, but the overhead of figuring out who to pay, and lawsuits from people (or their heirs) who don't think that they got paid enough, would be enough to shut down even a billion dollar company like RedHat, and if such rules had been in place from the beginning, companies like RedHat would never have gotten off the ground.