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Caveat Emptor. If you can't fork you aren't free. The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyit

by deepnet 10y ago

Caveat Emptor. If you can't fork you aren't free. The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyites - so it was a flagship for the sharing economy and open hardware. Now there is an impression that they closed it off. Make4rbot was bought by the holder of a patent for the sintering 3D printing technology, seen as an impediment to this useful methods community adoption. The price paid for Makerbot was handsome, but as everyone was doing OK already - this was perceived as 'selling out' and the goodwill began evaporating. The question then for Makerbot is: Does the momentum of being first to market trump the anger among the maker community & alpha adopters ? When I bought Minecraft at alpha, Mojang suggested it would become open - then after making more cash than anyone needs they sold it to Microsoft. I felt a bit betrayed, not because of $20 but because I promoted it and gave it to friends children and now they are tied into Microsoft which was the opposite of my intention. This problem echoes down the ages: traditionally bands sell out the truefans when they sign with the majors; the closing of the UNIX community when Bell was privatised; the emerging idea that cool hacks, hardware & software shouldn't be shared among friends, exemplified by Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club about BASIC. This makes new communities wonder if there is a way to prevent this - Stallman invented the GPL to stop the 'tradgedy of the commons' happening to his work & community. Is there a community GPL that could have been used for MakerBot to ensure it stayed community orientated ? Does this reflect the difference between Free and Open ? GPL & MIT, is this the tragedy of the commons that only the GPL ensures against ?

jackhack 10y ago
In a number of ways this echoes the early microcomputer industry (thinking the 1970s-80s), when dozens of competing and incompatible standards existed. Atari, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, just to name a few. And as the industry neared middle age in the 1990s, shopping for a "PC Clone" was a cornucopia of options: a copy of PC Shopper was hundreds of pages thick, each with ads for "custom made" PC clones "built to your specifications". Lead times of weeks, hundreds of case, motherboards, CPU, RAM and Video card options existed... and prices were in the $2000+. Now it's settled down to a few big players who essentially sell poorly-differentiated commodity items for paper-thin margins. It is to be expected as an industry matures. A company must choose where to place itself. Go after the high-end boutique market and risk pricing yourself out (if one can't communicate the price/value argument to customers), or become another "me too" supplier in a race to the bottom, following all the same steps as the competition, facing extinction due to lack of margin.
- deepnet 10y ago
  Mature free markets that entail paper thin margins are naturally disrupted and conquered. Jobs had seen Kay's Dynabook at Parc and had some vision of what portable computers could offer. Apple phones made $250 per phone, even with less than 0.5% of the market Jobs had already won as Nokia et al. made ~pence per phone. Cartels and Monopolies naturally aggregate to protect incumbents from the needs & desires of the customer and society from the painful costs of over rapid progress, yet like great empires companies decline when their owners lose touch with their daily customers needs, demands or desires. Intellectual property rights are not natural rights but a social contract, providing temporary monopoly in exchange for social benefit. Rinse and repeat.
bradyd 10y ago
GPL doesn't even protect against this kind of situation. The copyright holder is not bound by the GPL license, they are the one licensing it. Anything release under the GPL is still available as GPL, but the copyright holder has no obligation to release future changes under the GPL. They can instead have a proprietary license. Things can get a little more muddied with community contributions as the contributor owns the copyright to the change, unless they sign over the copyright as part of a contributor agreement.
- deepnet 10y ago
  Extrusion 3D printers derive from the research of the RepRap project, by Bowyer of Bath University, it is GPL. The MakerBot derives from this GPLed work - the first MakerBot parts were printed by a RepRap. This is a RepRap tradition that a RepRap print the parts for new RepRaps, a ceremonial self replication. So the MakerBot's intellectual property is not wholly their own and in fact is derives from a GPL licensed work. Is this a GPL violation or did MakerBot relicense the RepRap from Bath ? Perhaps the MakerBot is a 'clean room' redesign of the RepRap, but Pettis, MakerBot's founder was involved from the beginning and built RepRaps and the the MakerBot designs evolution (and initial part printing) from the RepRap is well documented by Make magazine. MakerBots not being GPL licensed seems like a GPL violation but IANAL.
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    They changed the design when they closed things up. As it's not a derived work, there's not a violation.
    - deepnet 10y ago
      Thanks for the follow-up, it is interesting to see how/ or not the GPL works in areas other than code. So redesigning from scratch, following strict clean room protocols (fresh designer who hasn't ever worked on the GPLed design, given a description only), defeats the GPL because it is based on copyright ? Presumably no GPLed RepRap derived community innovations were copied, if they were ( hypothetically an amazing way of doing the nozzle or special hot-plate method to avoid warping ) would this demonstrate a derived work and trigger GPL ? If this type of thing isn't a GPL trigger then why can't anyone clean room a different design of sintering tech and allow general sinter 3D printing and sales ? Is this difference because the GPL relies on copyright but 3D sintering is patent protected ? If so does Open Hardware need a GPL patent license, can that even be possible ? Has a hardware GPL case ever been brought ?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Yancey 10y ago
beautifully said. it's possible, but it's easier to sell out than it is to not sell out. and selling out has lost its stigma

by deepnet 10y ago

jackhack 10y ago

In a number of ways this echoes the early microcomputer industry (thinking the 1970s-80s), when dozens of competing and incompatible standards existed. Atari, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, just to name a few. And as the industry neared middle age in the 1990s, shopping for a "PC Clone" was a cornucopia of options: a copy of PC Shopper was hundreds of pages thick, each with ads for "custom made" PC clones "built to your specifications". Lead times of weeks, hundreds of case, motherboards, CPU, RAM and Video card options existed... and prices were in the $2000+. Now it's settled down to a few big players who essentially sell poorly-differentiated commodity items for paper-thin margins. It is to be expected as an industry matures. A company must choose where to place itself. Go after the high-end boutique market and risk pricing yourself out (if one can't communicate the price/value argument to customers), or become another "me too" supplier in a race to the bottom, following all the same steps as the competition, facing extinction due to lack of margin.

deepnet 10y ago
Mature free markets that entail paper thin margins are naturally disrupted and conquered. Jobs had seen Kay's Dynabook at Parc and had some vision of what portable computers could offer. Apple phones made $250 per phone, even with less than 0.5% of the market Jobs had already won as Nokia et al. made ~pence per phone. Cartels and Monopolies naturally aggregate to protect incumbents from the needs & desires of the customer and society from the painful costs of over rapid progress, yet like great empires companies decline when their owners lose touch with their daily customers needs, demands or desires. Intellectual property rights are not natural rights but a social contract, providing temporary monopoly in exchange for social benefit. Rinse and repeat.

bradyd 10y ago

GPL doesn't even protect against this kind of situation. The copyright holder is not bound by the GPL license, they are the one licensing it. Anything release under the GPL is still available as GPL, but the copyright holder has no obligation to release future changes under the GPL. They can instead have a proprietary license. Things can get a little more muddied with community contributions as the contributor owns the copyright to the change, unless they sign over the copyright as part of a contributor agreement.

deepnet 10y ago
Extrusion 3D printers derive from the research of the RepRap project, by Bowyer of Bath University, it is GPL. The MakerBot derives from this GPLed work - the first MakerBot parts were printed by a RepRap. This is a RepRap tradition that a RepRap print the parts for new RepRaps, a ceremonial self replication. So the MakerBot's intellectual property is not wholly their own and in fact is derives from a GPL licensed work. Is this a GPL violation or did MakerBot relicense the RepRap from Bath ? Perhaps the MakerBot is a 'clean room' redesign of the RepRap, but Pettis, MakerBot's founder was involved from the beginning and built RepRaps and the the MakerBot designs evolution (and initial part printing) from the RepRap is well documented by Make magazine. MakerBots not being GPL licensed seems like a GPL violation but IANAL.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  They changed the design when they closed things up. As it's not a derived work, there's not a violation.
  - deepnet 10y ago
    Thanks for the follow-up, it is interesting to see how/ or not the GPL works in areas other than code. So redesigning from scratch, following strict clean room protocols (fresh designer who hasn't ever worked on the GPLed design, given a description only), defeats the GPL because it is based on copyright ? Presumably no GPLed RepRap derived community innovations were copied, if they were ( hypothetically an amazing way of doing the nozzle or special hot-plate method to avoid warping ) would this demonstrate a derived work and trigger GPL ? If this type of thing isn't a GPL trigger then why can't anyone clean room a different design of sintering tech and allow general sinter 3D printing and sales ? Is this difference because the GPL relies on copyright but 3D sintering is patent protected ? If so does Open Hardware need a GPL patent license, can that even be possible ? Has a hardware GPL case ever been brought ?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Yancey 10y ago

beautifully said. it's possible, but it's easier to sell out than it is to not sell out. and selling out has lost its stigma