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The answer is on who you expect to innovate more: big corps that can afford to file, defend, and acquire patents or individual makers? America will win only wh

The answer is on who you expect to innovate more: big corps that can afford to file, defend, and acquire patents or individual makers? America will win only when we can support both use cases.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "America will win"? What do you mean win? Open source hardware is really good at making things low cost, because whoever can offer the best value (low cost, reasonably quality) will succeed. So what if we did that with big stuff like MRI machines and semiconductor fabricating equipment and robotics? Wouldn't that make all that stuff cheap, thereby making us better off? Like health care and car repairs and manufacturing would all be cheaper, and we can use that to thrive.
- ausbah 6y ago
  but where do all the resources for creating complicated technologies like chip fabrication and MRI machines come from? small start ups certainly can't, at least not for large scale R&D. only gov'ts and large corporations really can, and the latter only will if they have some guarantee of making a profit off of the work they put into the tec
- catherd 6y ago
  Open source hardware is also really good at allowing whoever can produce something cheapest to capture all the profits. Unless the designers are careful about controlling the results of their labor they won't be the ones "thriving", or even benefiting. It only works in certain niches where the technical aspects of production or market naturally exclude most other manufacturers. Or what about designers who don't necessarily want to be in production just to make money? Ask someone who has spent years and thousands of dollars developing something only to have a copy shop in Asia start selling their widget for half the cost a month after the design files get posted if they think that's a sustainable business model.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    I guess I am asking a systems question. I am asking if it is worth researching what a more open or fully open economy would do for the overall rate of innovation. If we found that it was better to be more open, we could find a way to slowly transition to a more open economy. After transition, you would know someone else may duplicate your work, and you would invest appropriately. You might invest less but you would also benefit more directly from everyone else's investment, so it is non obvious if you would be better or worse off. "Open source hardware is also really good at allowing whoever can produce something cheapest to capture all the profits." Please name specific companies to back up this claim. Open hardware companies that succeed despite clones are Arduino, Prusa Research, Sparkfun, Adafruit... Certainly the rules would be different in an open economy, and so we would have to transition with care. But I think there is a chance that an open economy would have a higher rate of overall innovation. If that were true, the implications for humanity would be staggering. We can duplicate information for free, and so we can duplicate some forms of value for free. But I have never seen an economic theory that leverages this obvious feature of computerized information to produce more value.
- Ccecil 6y ago
  "OpenHardware is engineering on an artist's business model" -Logxen (at least the first person I heard say it :) ) Openhardware is more than about being the cheapest...it is about free modification of anything and everything involved in the project and the ability to share, innovate, sell (as long as GPL is respected) and create. I would actually argue that what makes OSHW projects weaker is the race to the bottom. I watched this happen in more than one OSHW community so far that I have been involved in. Largely, the core devs abandon projects once they get big enough to bring in the cloners since typically you end up getting a lot of "You need to fix this because we are using it, we don't care if we buy your hardware, you are responsible for making it work to my needs". I know this is very common in OSS as well. It is very frustrating to watch happen knowing that the cloners (in our case) do not respect GPL of the project, do not handle their own customer support and sell at a rate which makes it so the "real devs" cannot afford to maintain the project. Even knowing all this though...I still have a focus on OSHW over patents. My personal belief is that patents only are valuable if you can defend them. I also feel that if I have something valuable enough to want to patent it is probably something the world may need...why not give it away and help everyone. The real benefit of OSHW is the same thing that can make it very difficult as well...everything is open, so you leave yourself open to all compliments as well as criticisms...there are times where some people with very high level training are willing to help by contributing but more importantly by trolling. If you can fix the issues that they are complaining about, it shows that you are interested in helping the community (and at times they are also very high level people who are not intending to help but they are pointing out issues which may be opaque to the devs). As far as OSHW robotics. Look into Moveo for a hardware example (there are others) and ROS for control software. Background: I have been working directly with Reprap since 2011 (Long time member and Op in #reprap@freenode) and working with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project since ~2013 doing QA/Inspection/Test/Rework/Hand building protos.

The answer is on who you expect to innovate more: big corps that can afford to file, defend, and acquire patents or individual makers? America will win only when we can support both use cases.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "America will win"? What do you mean win? Open source hardware is really good at making things low cost, because whoever can offer the best value (low cost, reasonably quality) will succeed. So what if we did that with big stuff like MRI machines and semiconductor fabricating equipment and robotics? Wouldn't that make all that stuff cheap, thereby making us better off? Like health care and car repairs and manufacturing would all be cheaper, and we can use that to thrive.

ausbah 6y ago
but where do all the resources for creating complicated technologies like chip fabrication and MRI machines come from? small start ups certainly can't, at least not for large scale R&D. only gov'ts and large corporations really can, and the latter only will if they have some guarantee of making a profit off of the work they put into the tec
catherd 6y ago
Open source hardware is also really good at allowing whoever can produce something cheapest to capture all the profits. Unless the designers are careful about controlling the results of their labor they won't be the ones "thriving", or even benefiting. It only works in certain niches where the technical aspects of production or market naturally exclude most other manufacturers. Or what about designers who don't necessarily want to be in production just to make money? Ask someone who has spent years and thousands of dollars developing something only to have a copy shop in Asia start selling their widget for half the cost a month after the design files get posted if they think that's a sustainable business model.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  I guess I am asking a systems question. I am asking if it is worth researching what a more open or fully open economy would do for the overall rate of innovation. If we found that it was better to be more open, we could find a way to slowly transition to a more open economy. After transition, you would know someone else may duplicate your work, and you would invest appropriately. You might invest less but you would also benefit more directly from everyone else's investment, so it is non obvious if you would be better or worse off. "Open source hardware is also really good at allowing whoever can produce something cheapest to capture all the profits." Please name specific companies to back up this claim. Open hardware companies that succeed despite clones are Arduino, Prusa Research, Sparkfun, Adafruit... Certainly the rules would be different in an open economy, and so we would have to transition with care. But I think there is a chance that an open economy would have a higher rate of overall innovation. If that were true, the implications for humanity would be staggering. We can duplicate information for free, and so we can duplicate some forms of value for free. But I have never seen an economic theory that leverages this obvious feature of computerized information to produce more value.
Ccecil 6y ago
"OpenHardware is engineering on an artist's business model" -Logxen (at least the first person I heard say it :) ) Openhardware is more than about being the cheapest...it is about free modification of anything and everything involved in the project and the ability to share, innovate, sell (as long as GPL is respected) and create. I would actually argue that what makes OSHW projects weaker is the race to the bottom. I watched this happen in more than one OSHW community so far that I have been involved in. Largely, the core devs abandon projects once they get big enough to bring in the cloners since typically you end up getting a lot of "You need to fix this because we are using it, we don't care if we buy your hardware, you are responsible for making it work to my needs". I know this is very common in OSS as well. It is very frustrating to watch happen knowing that the cloners (in our case) do not respect GPL of the project, do not handle their own customer support and sell at a rate which makes it so the "real devs" cannot afford to maintain the project. Even knowing all this though...I still have a focus on OSHW over patents. My personal belief is that patents only are valuable if you can defend them. I also feel that if I have something valuable enough to want to patent it is probably something the world may need...why not give it away and help everyone. The real benefit of OSHW is the same thing that can make it very difficult as well...everything is open, so you leave yourself open to all compliments as well as criticisms...there are times where some people with very high level training are willing to help by contributing but more importantly by trolling. If you can fix the issues that they are complaining about, it shows that you are interested in helping the community (and at times they are also very high level people who are not intending to help but they are pointing out issues which may be opaque to the devs). As far as OSHW robotics. Look into Moveo for a hardware example (there are others) and ROS for control software. Background: I have been working directly with Reprap since 2011 (Long time member and Op in #reprap@freenode) and working with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project since ~2013 doing QA/Inspection/Test/Rework/Hand building protos.