If you want to share designs, but you want reciprocity and you want to retain some control, then I wouldn't bother with "licenses" as we have them in the software world - as in "I drop this here, stick a license on it, and someone can grab it and use it under these terms, without ever talking to me". Rather, offer people the option to sign a little contract in order to use it. Keep the barrier as low as possible, an…
He may not get reciprocity but his platform absolutely benefits from it being open source. The number of mods this has enabled makes his printer better. It’s that simple in my mind.
Reciprocity is a recurring issue in open-source, and I don't take the doom-and-gloom take, or the pretty optimistic take of this author. It's happened many times in both software and hardware (ElasticSearch, Arduino), and while it does help make your company a standard... it also can severely hurt the original company. What's the point of being the standard, if you've been hurt by it instead of benefiting? Obvious ex…
There is a conflation of ideas here. Arduino was not created to stand for Italian manufactoring or fair wages. > The Arduino project began in 2005 as a tool for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, aiming to provide a low-cost and easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators. The main Purpose was "easy and low-cost acce…
Speaking for myself (an unemployed tinkerer), I bought three Pi Picos instead of one Arduino because Picos were $4 and Arduinos were $24, meaning I could buy three Picos for half the price, and hang onto them for future projects I need a microcontroller for. I cannot justify buying a $24 Arduino to solder together a game controller to USB converter, when I can get a preflashed clone Arduino, plus custom PCB with three controller connectors (then solder them on myself), for $16. (makerfabs.com sells Arduino Nanos for $9 if you can trust them, which I don't since their website spawned a Russian liveinternet.ru popup window likely from a malicious script.)
The clones in many ways are better engineering . Any engineer can build a bridge. Only a good engineer can build a bridge that meets all the user requirements, while not massively overengineering the structure (and hence the budget). They typically cut just the right corners to make a still functional product at a vastly reduced price. And for that, the clone-makers are, IMO, contributing to the ecosystem. The origin…
I'm not aware of a single clone of the prusa designs that have been as good as prusa's. Prusa's machines are expensive but by and large "just work", and keep on working, and have a strong reputation for this, backed by them eating their own dogfood, producing printers with their printers. The clones are almost always require a lot of tweaking/fixes/upgrades and aren't durable or reliable. Some of them are downright d…
What will change from that if they don't publish their designs?
Knockoff producers will figure it out anyway, that's their entire business and they're good at it.
The only people hurt are the actual customers, who probably don't have as much experience reverse-engineering.
Perhaps he should use a license where a company has to pay if they sell more than $N copies of the product, or something along those lines.
Most of the cheap "copies" are not copies at all though. They are Iterations on the idea like Prusa was an Iteration itself. Most people when talk about copies talk about products like Creality Ender whihc in fact has so little or nothing of Prusa Designs. The frame is completly different (Extruded Aluminuium profiles vs Single piece cut) the movement guides are completly different (Rollers on V Aluminium profiles vs Rods with bushings, The Board is based on Melzi vs Rambo, The Extruder is different, the sensors are different etc etc. The only thing in common they have is that they are both Simple Cartesian Systems with a fixed Z Bed but this was not something that Prusa Invented. Nothing on these systems (maybe with the exception of the PCB Heated Bed) is an original Prusa Idea.
Prusa's Problem is not that they are copying his design, it's that they are Iterating and often improving faster and cheaper than Prusa and these improvements are not given back to the open community, howevere for every "closed" improvement there has been, the community has found open alternatives.
The clones in many ways are better engineering . Any engineer can build a bridge. Only a good engineer can build a bridge that meets all the user requirements, while not massively overengineering the structure (and hence the budget). They typically cut just the right corners to make a still functional product at a vastly reduced price. And for that, the clone-makers are, IMO, contributing to the ecosystem. The origin…
I'm not aware of a single clone of the prusa designs that have been as good as prusa's. Prusa's machines are expensive but by and large "just work", and keep on working, and have a strong reputation for this, backed by them eating their own dogfood, producing printers with their printers. The clones are almost always require a lot of tweaking/fixes/upgrades and aren't durable or reliable. Some of them are downright d…
Word has it the Sovol SV06 is giving the Mk3S+ a run for its money.
Many ham radio designs are open source, including hardware. Often the original designer isn't even selling kits, so there's no profit incentive. Yet they still have problems with Chinese manufacturers. They will swap components or make changes making designs worse, then sell the meaningfully inferior product under the name of the open source product. This has lead to open source creators, with no profit incentive, st…
I think that's a trademark issue and completely different beast. Plenty of free software don't allow to reuse their names. Nothing wrong about it and does not restrict user in any meaningful way.
I think this is one of the few things Prusa actually gets right- it takes serious gall to carbon copy something (there are plenty of cheap, mostly Chinese printers out there, but the vast majority are fairly different to the Mk3, not outright clones)- but not even the cloniest of cloners would dare to call it an Original Prusa i3 MK3s sold by Prusa Research by Josef Prusa.
If you want to share designs, but you want reciprocity and you want to retain some control, then I wouldn't bother with "licenses" as we have them in the software world - as in "I drop this here, stick a license on it, and someone can grab it and use it under these terms, without ever talking to me". Rather, offer people the option to sign a little contract in order to use it. Keep the barrier as low as possible, an…
> If "the Chinese" want to clone your product, then you are often out of luck anyway. Although that is not entirely true anymore, my previous company fought in China against clones and IP theft a couple times and won. But you need to have a local presence, a local subsidary that can hire lawyers etc.. If you are just outsourcing production to third parties then it gets problematic. This is the take I think people are…
This.
As a lawyer friend of mine put it, when working between academics and industry in other countries: "Contracts and licenses are not deflector shields. You have to be willing to sue in that country. If you don't trust your partners, a piece of paper isn't going to fix that."
I think some people have a romantic vision of open source contributors: nerds that feed themself with "likes" on GitHub, simpleton that waste a significant part of they free time to write code to benefit few smart guys able to valorise they sweat enriching their companies. But "Open Source" is NOT free, there are licenses that must be respected and a company that use 1:1 an open source project , WITHOUT contribute to it development in any way, WITHOUT to release the modified source code, using the open source material to COMPETE against the entity that respect the license, commits a crime. You reflect on that primarily when the economy isn't that good and massive layoff leave the same open source contributors without a job. IMHO, I think that the system of licensing and enforcement of the open source licenses must be rethought. Moreover I personally saw company using 'free for open source' tools to develop commercial products , doing, in that way , unfair competition to honest companies that pay the due licenses. I'm also reflecting about my open source stuff, for sure I'll make some change about what I release and how. So, in short I think Mr. PRůša is right, releasing later the blueprints ensure at least some level of protection against unfair concurrence by cloners that if you have a company with employees expose them nd their families to layoffs. It is HIS RIGHT. But, again, I think the "open source system" should be modified to insure to open source contributors some degrees of rights protection.
I'm not astonished any more, you see the same attitude with all these new open source but not really software licenses people are coming up with (of both the restrict big business usage and restrict usage for "evil" purposes variety). People want the goodwill and potential free labor that comes from being open source without the actual requirements of being open source.
It’s not just that. Makerbot had the same problem before they got bought out, that’s why the Replicator 2 went closed. It’s one thing to take a design, modify it/improve it, and sell it. It’s another to wait for someone with a good reputation to design something good (with all the costs that entails), make a perfect clone, and sell it as a perfect clone for much less because you didn’t have to pay for the R&D. You’re…