17 ms·

When open becomes opaque: The changing face of open-source hardware companies

464 points by Santosh83 3y ago

reaperman 3y ago
This is a very well-written article by someone who is intimately knowledgeable of the history of the field. The interview with Josef Průša is particularly illuminating. It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies).
- teraflop 3y ago
  In case anyone else was curious, the author is Phillip Torrone. (On mobile, the byline is buried in the page footer all the way below the comments, and easy to miss.)
- inconceivable 3y ago
  china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. if your company is not compatible with china existing, one of these things is going away, and it isn't china. the madder you get, the less they care. they're on the other side of the planet and have their own system. they're not even thinking about you as they go about their business. i swear it's like the collective west just infinite-loops through the stages of grief when it comes to china even existing. and to those of you who think "well we have to do something about it" -- yeah, the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term.
  - ChrisKnott 3y ago
    Stealing IP is basically a blue shell. At some point probably China will be leading tech innovation and the West will have little incentive to respect their patents.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - samtho 3y ago
      I just can’t see the PRC and the CCP in its current form sticking around long enough. Between their demographic collapse and pushback on globalization amongst some of the largest nations and economic zones who trade with China (not the mention China imports most of its food), we will see the CCP take an even firmer grasp just before it either collapses or disintegrates. We will likely see the largest cities revert to self-governance and then we will have a better understanding of the geopolitical landscape in which we will all operate in. If Hong Kong‘s economic and political influence positions it to self-govern once again, perhaps taking much of Guangdong with it, we may see more respect for global IP protections.
      - solardev 3y ago
        Is fragmenting into city states more likely than the CCP continuing to change, as it has over the past few decades? Chinese cultural identity, centered around Han dominance and collectivism, has been a unifying force for quite some time. HK was a major exception because of British influence, but I have a hard time seeing the rest of the country willingly breaking up rather than just slowly forcing through change.
      - inconceivable 3y ago
        ground breaking novel analysis: china is going to collapse any day now. for real this time. maybe if we keep repeating it enough, it will happen.
      - dirtyid 3y ago
        PRC global trade increased by 1 trillion with a T in the last 4 years, more than the prior 10 years. That's the greatest expansion in globalism... ever. Most with the global south, some of which is redirected trade to western block who realized they can't decouple but only derisk while the PRC has increased global integration more than... ever. Meanwhile PRC is moving from 25% skilled workforce to 60/70/80% like an advanced economy by spamming ~5M stem per year - for next 20-30 years they'll be reaping the greatest concentrated pool of skilled labour demographic dividend... also ever. Maybe post 2060s demography will be an issue like JP whose problem is they couldn't replace skilled labour at parity and even then they just merely stayed... very competitive. That's what a PRC "collapse" will look like, a massive Japan (as in multiple Japans) where median projection paints 2100 PRC as the second largest country with a skilled workforce many times larger than 2023 PRC. Conveniently, also one that doesn't have to import calories/energy. That's the problem with focusing only on the demographic pyramid and not actual demographic workforce composition. Yes PRC will have demographic challenges, but demographic trends also point toward overwhelming PRC global competitiveness and geopolitical security.
  - daniel_reetz 3y ago
    Also, this is OSHW - Open Source Hardware - a _copyright_ based license, U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. Patents are a whole other subject. This article is about Open Hardware being abused, not patents. I stopped working on OSHW because it can't protect hardware. It has no legal teeth. Better to just give it away (public domain or whatever).
    - blackguardx 3y ago
      Hardware can be copyrighted, but it only protects the PCB layout.
    - kayfox 3y ago
      > U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. It does, it specifically protects chip die masks and by implication and case law protects PCB layouts and circuit diagrams.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. China can do whatever the f..k they want. The problem is our own governments: they could and should have sanctioned the country to oblivion... had they not foolishly tied their entire nations to the success of China. We all allowed, hell we welcomed Chinese products in our markets because our population got a decade or two of cheap Chinese made crap products which helped to hide wage stagnation (and rich CEOs getting ever richer). Then we got addicted, a ton of jobs got shipped off to China, here in Germany they stripped an entire mining facility and sent it overseas [1], and far-right parties fed themselves fat on the resulting economic devastation. And then we went even more foolish and sat idly by as our car companies completely ignored the domestic market and only focused on growing in China... with the predictable fuck-up that China learned how to make cheap EVs and now our industry is at the curb of collapsing against cheap Chinese cars and no competent competition bar Tesla. [1] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach-china.html https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach...
    - leidenfrost 3y ago
      The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. 20 years ago it "could" be justified by selling the idea that American or European labor is light years away in terms of quality compared to Chinese or any developing country's labor. And that may still be true, but the gap has shrunk in size by a lot. To the point that corporations may not want to pay 120k or 200k a year for something that can be made in a developing country for 20k a year and with ~80% of the quality.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        > The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. The thing is, the comparatively high labor cost in Western countries is so high because we can actually have a life on it and feed a bunch of uber rich people with our labor and taxes (because guess what, people like Warren Buffett and his ilk pay a ridiculously low tax rate [1] compared to legitimately employed working class people). In contrast, China, India, Thailand or Vietnam can offer very cheap labor because for the people there even utter pittances and absolutely ridiculous exploitation are better than the life these people had before. While I do support the efforts China and India both have committed to lifting literally a billion of people out of utter poverty, it has at the same time brought disastrous consequences on our own society. I'd be happier with globalization if we had forced importers of any good to make sure that wages, labor conditions and environmental impact were on par with domestic regulations because the status quo is exploitation on all levels to benefit Western oligarchs (and imagine how the life of Chinese factory workers would be with Western wages!). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg-icahn-and-soros-pay-little-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg...
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    In other words, intellectual property does not work. That era ended a while ago, and the west is still playing pretend.
    - disintegore 3y ago
      It was always a farce to begin with. Inventing scarcity where there is none because there was zero willingness to organize production around anything other than markets. It was a bad but understandably necessary move back when the printing press was invented. Centuries later, with practically instant and practically infinite reproduction of most types of information, it's pure insanity.
      - thomastjeffery 3y ago
        It was workable when there was a real cost associated with reproduction. Everyone knew it was arbitrary social scaffolding, but it was stable enough for society to keep it standing. Now that scaffold has no real foundation, save for a handful of gigantic corporations holding on as tightly as they can, and punishing anyone who dares contradict them.
    - yarg 3y ago
      It can't work if you're willing to engage with bad faith players, and are unwilling to call them out for their bullshit. China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now. Punish them for their malfeasance. The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products. Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal. Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
      - thomastjeffery 3y ago
        > call them out Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate? That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work. So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up. We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.
  - oytis 3y ago
    > the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term. Come on, China was pretty irrelevant to the outside world until the US started pumping money into it in the 70s. That's exactly what the West should stop doing.
    - inconceivable 3y ago
      the reason you are so confused is because your assumption that china just popped into existence fully-formed in 1945 or whatever, is totally and utterly wrong and ignores literally hundreds if not thousands of years of relevant history. literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on.
      - cracrecry 3y ago
        >literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on. China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. To portray Chinese like saints or victims is not knowing about the thousands of years you talk about.
        cyberax 3y ago
        > China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. Uhm... You clearly have no idea about China. First, it was _itself_ conquered by Mongols ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China ). Who were then simply assimilated. Second, China has never conquered Japan. Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
        disintegore 3y ago
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). I wish Western countries had import bans on goods manufactured by Chinese companies that did that.
  - impalallama 3y ago
    It’s happened but only on highly strategically important stuff like microprocessors
- eropple 3y ago
  So...the thing is, the real competitors to the Prusa i3 printers are open-source. Like, actually. The Sovol SV06 is a Chinese printer very clearly based on the Prusa i3 heritage. It's an excellent alternative to the MK3S+ and the firmware source and CAD designs are on GitHub. There are definitely budget-range 3D printers with an i3 heritage (probably not derived tightly from the Prusa design, a lot of them seem like the product of one engineer and a disassembled Ender 3), but the SV06 is for my money the one to get, and it's a quarter of the price of an MK3S+, without the bizarre-in-2023 "preassembled" option that's table stakes for everybody else. The bigger problem seems to be that the i3 printers are table stakes now, while Prusa engine seized up and forward progress went to pot. The Prusa XL is not vaporware but it's close and preposterously expensive, while the MK4 released without input shaping in their extremely customized port of Marlin. Those "Chinese knockoffs" are shipping Klipper-based printers, with SBCs, where you get that for free. And then you have the Bambu printers, which are OSS-compliant where required (their slicer is a derivative of PrusaSlicer) but built an in-house OS (not actually that shocking, and almost certainly not pirated; 3D printers just aren't that hard) that has given them a printer that's conservatively 18-24 months ahead of everybody except maybe Prusa with the XL. I really don't like Bambu's patent saber-rattling, that sucks, but they just shipped a better mousetrap, too. Open-source 3D printing is on the ropes because it isn't making stuff as good as the closed-source stuff. Not because of cheap cloners. I didn't want to buy a Bambu printer so held out for the Creality K1 (and they are being bad citizens, they haven't released their Klipper source) and it's not good, I waited for Prusa to sell me on a Prusa XL but to get one I'll be waiting until 2024 at the earliest and spending $500 on that "preassembled" option to boot, and...Bambu just sold me a P1S with an AMS for $1000 flat. C'mon.
  - wasted_intel 3y ago
    > which are OSS-compliant where required This is the crux of the problem. Where Prusa is openly sharing, you have companies that are benefiting from that without reciprocating. Part of the tax you're paying when buying an i3MK4 is the continued investment in the open source/hardware contributions of the company, not just the end product. Shelling out $1k for a Bambu is your prerogative, but it does cast a vote with your wallet for a company that is more predatory than collaborative.
- tmchu 3y ago
  >It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). Why is this China factor even a problem for open-source? The open source community have always been threaten by closed-source copycat. Even western companies also do that without much repercussion. The real threat is, as the article pointed out, the trend of `open source` companies going closed source because of profit motive.
  - nyolfen 3y ago
    prusa describes the issue as being that chinese enterprises file for bogus patents in china at scale based on open source work, and due to trade agreements the patents can be extended to other countries. even if the patents are bogus they could still file suit to crush western competitors at home by wasting resources, and they have state backing/funding
    - tmchu 3y ago
      Again, litigation and patent trolls are nothing new to the community. Claiming China in this case sounds like a crutch to wash off their own image after doing fishy thing themselves.
    - eropple 3y ago
      Prusa's primary opponent in this space would be Bambu--who, to be clear, are rattling their saber about patents, and they suck for that. They also have a better, faster printer that has its full feature set available on release, and Prusa does not. I am more annoyed that Prusa is doing a bad job of shepherding open source and shipping bad products than that Bambu has a closed-source better one.
      - chaxor 3y ago
        This is very close to the academia/industry divide. Academia (the public) spends an enormous amount of money investing in research to discover something novel and effective, or makes a large efficiency gain. Industry reads that, and implements it, with some minor tweaks. This, products are made for fractions of the cost it would have otherwise cost to make, with large improvements over previous capabilities, due to the work done in the public sphere. Effectively very similar to open and closed source.
- gchadwick 3y ago
  Are the Chinese companies actually persuing IP claims? What it says about patents is concerning but there's no concrete example of practical issues from it so far. If a Chinese company simply makes and sells a version of an open source design are they doing anything wrong? This is allowed by the licensing terms.
  - nyolfen 3y ago
    per prusa's comments in the article, they are filing patents based on open source work at scale
    - eropple 3y ago
      Patents, yes. Deployed patents, not to date. I have only marginal sympathy for Prusa when they aren't shipping things people want to buy.
  - Fomite 3y ago
    Bambu has been saber rattling. Ironically, I think it's less aimed at Prusa and more at their own Chinese knock-off competitors.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). The problem is rather the customers who buy China stuff instead of products from companies from western countries.
- disintegore 3y ago
  There's something I'm just not getting with Prusa's justification. With open hardware, anyone can take your designs and run with them. Not just Chinese companies with zero regard for IP law. There is no IP to have regard for. Mercantilist policies in China should affect all western companies in that market more or less the same. I am not seeing how relicensing will make Prusa3D's business more viable.
  - karurosu 3y ago
    The problem is not stealing the design, the problem is stealing the design, getting a patent based on it then suing you. Even if its obviously a bogus patent the cost and time required to fight it off can kill your company.
- blitzar 3y ago
  https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53 https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88... "The upstart nation was a den of intellectual piracy. One of its top officials urged his countrymen to steal and copy foreign machinery. Across the ocean, a leading industrial power tried in vain to guard its trade secrets from the brash young rival. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rogue nation was the United States."
h2odragon 3y ago
Go back to the start of Intellectual Property law. Patents are supposed to be a deal between the inventor and society, inventors get rich for 17 years of exclusivity then the public gets to have the whole design available to use. Fair deal. What we have now is not a fair deal, to the point that people are trying to re-invent the notions that the laws were originally supposed to embody.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  one I first started coming online, there was no "intellectual property law" what there was: trademark law, copyright law, and patent law. but 3 turn to 1?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - technothrasher 3y ago
    You were online in the 1960s? The term "intellectual property law" started to be commonly used after the formation of the World Intellectual Property Organization in 1967.
    - andyinfrance 3y ago
      Hi Technothrasher, sorry to jump this thread, was reading about a thread 46 days ago where you have made ecu replacements for 308’s I presume that’s with the Bosch K-Jetronic and Magneti Marelli 801/802a ecu’s? Can you contact me about these I’m interested, thanks
    - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
      an international organizaion does not pass laws in any country. NGOs such as that one (which I admit did not know existed) influence countries into shifting their laws over a long time when I stared coming online, national talk about IP laws was just starting out. I don't keep up to date with law reforms, but in the late 90s mainstream awareness was shifting into this mindset of IP law. and back then, the law still spoke of those 3 concepts on their own. I suppose now it's really just one blob of ownership over ideas for the sake of some misguided market-ideology
buildbot 3y ago
Shouldn’t any international patent office reject these suspect patents based of open source software and hardware? Also, why does for example, US customs not step in and enforce stopping the importation of infringing devices? They seem to be happy to do that to sparkfun before, seizing one of their shipments https://hackaday.com/2014/03/20/fluke-issues-statement-regarding-sparkfuns-impounded-multimeters/ https://hackaday.com/2014/03/20/fluke-issues-statement-regar...
- Palomides 3y ago
  at least the US patent office takes a pretty weak "let the courts figure it out" approach, and I think customs enforcement is pretty similar in that it has to be prompted to act (actually checking every shipment for every possible violation seems impossible anyway)
- toast0 3y ago
  Patent offices can check whatever resources they want in terms of finding prior art. But in practice, they mostly just check patent applications, because they have a big database of those.
  - varispeed 3y ago
    But they don't do that. Basically as it seems most patents, however ridiculous, get accepted and idea is that the real test for patent is when someone "breaches" it and it goes to court.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's open patent. Sure there's prior art which can prevent someone from creating a patent but if you actually want to guarantee that somebody doesn't patent your work, the path to do that is to file a patent yourself and open that patent up with patentleft (the patent analog for copyleft) or some other open patent. Yes filing patents can be expensive but for these companies it shouldn't be an issue and if they truly are a tiny org without the capabilities to file as a standard org, they can file under the small entity or micro entity fee schedules which are far cheaper.
paulkrush 3y ago
I want a new or more terms for this. Open source hardware kinda implies it's a legal catagory. It's a dream, and way to be social, not a legal thing. I am begining to like "DIY" better. As "This is hardware that is standard and easy to copy." Because it's so easy to copy and everybody does, it's easy to live in this world. I need to process this thought more. Also I am using the word hardware to imply mecanical design. I think it's easier to have open source hardware if you are taking about pcb boards.
mcdonje 3y ago
Open source projects with permissive licenses are subject to this kind of abuse by companies who benefit from the community and then wall off their derivative projects without paying the community back by way of contributions. I do think there's a place for permissive licenses, particularly for academic and government projects. However, it seems like private entities can't be trusted to play nice, so copyleft licenses should probably be used by more open source projects to protect the public knowledge base.
- andy99 3y ago
  Copyleft is good for "complete" products, where you want to protect a derivative work from being walled off. It's harder to know the best way to handle modules (which might be the more common case in hardware) where a viral license can make using them impractical.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    LGPL then
unintendedcons 3y ago
Chinese practices poisoning the well for everybody, again?
- undersuit 3y ago
  Why did we make a well with a button on it that says "don't press; releases poison"?
  - jimmyk2 3y ago
    The button spits out 1/10 of 1¢ every time it is pressed. The man pressing the button has his own reservoir of clean water.
- mcdonje 3y ago
  China is hardly alone in patent-trolling and government subsidized predatory pricing. The boogyman narrative is a bit of a red herring. Our patent system is broken. Our copyright system is broken. IP laws stifle innovation and are abused by public and private entities. China is just currently abusing fundamentally flawed systems better than everyone else.
pierat 3y ago
> Last year (2022) Arduino took in a Series B funding round of $32 million. [link:https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/07/series-b-funding-round-of-32-million-for-arduino/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/07/series-b-funding-round-...] > [quote from the link] “So today, we dial up our vision for universal innovation with a clear strategy to expand our portfolio for professionals, supported by a Series B funding round of $32 million led by the global deep tech investor Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), joined by Renesas, Anzu Partners, and Arm.” Remember folks, "VC's rhyme with feces". They will enshittify your business faster than every toilet being used during the Super Bowl. Arduino is the latest casualty.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  Arduino has basically dominated every place where someone first touches a microcontroller. Schools and most early learners buy legit arduinos. Why did they need VC funding?
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Greed.
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      Zero empathy then. Imagine the actual innovation we'd see with actual lawless ip laws. Everyone iterating from everyone else. It's how china caught up and in some areas surpassed. Maybe our IP model is just weights on a runner's ankles.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        iirc a recent study suggested that there is no measurable social benefit (eg, increase in rate of innovation) from patents, but I can't immediately find a source for that. But generally everyone has this idea of the scrappy inventor in their garage inventing the flux capacitor and that's not really how it works, patents are like H1-Bs, they are a thing that benefits the companies with enough scale and legal resources to lobby and work the system. And those guys are gonna be fine regardless. it's unsurprising though because in general even in the happy case, you have locked an invention to a single company for 28 years and that's an eternity in the modern era. And future slight improvements effectively refresh/evergreen the patent, because there's usually only a couple viable ways of doing something. I think of this as the "e-ink" scenario, where there's this fantastic tech that's locked to a company that wants to work out recurring-revenue licensing models for hundreds of dollars per device per year and such, and slow-walks innovation secure in the knowledge that if a competitor does appear that they not only have years of head-start but could sqush them in litigation. Then in the unhappy case you've got the places that get a patent for "updates delivered over the internet" or "e-commerce on a website" like the one that tried to shake down newegg. Most companies will just pay up rather than fight it on principle, regardless of how egregious the patent is. And such patents obviously should never be issued but the patent office don't care and the legal system allows jurisdiction-shopping that ensure that once issued, the patents will find a sympathetic venue in a red state that's happy to rake in the court fees. Imagine if it's your small LLC that gets targeted instead of a company like Newegg with enough resources to fight, this is a huge instance of that "big companies exploit the system to squash smaller upstarts" failure mode that reduces innovation. and really the existence of the system at all essentially ensures at least some friction loss of innovation due to the mere possibility of problem B occurring. Let alone in systems (like ours) where it actually does occur frequently and blatantly. even when it is not flagrantly obvious like the above-mentioned (real, issued) patents, the standard of "not obvious to a skilled practioner in the art" is not really being enforced, or an incredibly low bar of "not obvious" is being utilized (de facto it only seems to mean prior art). A shit-ton of these things are things that would be obvious to any engineer that sat down and worked whatever problem through. If it's going to exist, it ideally would be very narrowly targeted, and perhaps even the patent duration and terms should be customized to the significance and innovativeness of the invention. If you invent a cancer drug and take it through trials that should be handled differently than "3d printer but with a different kind of head inspired by a pastry machine that builds a print 10% better" or whatever. unfortunately if you remove the patent system that actually disadvantages you internationally, because you didn't patent your thing! And of course it's against the international treaties/etc (which we wrote and could change but still). Again, this actually prevents you from even toning down the abuse of the system because if a US patent is harder to get than any other, you are just disadvantaging US companies. And if you create an uneven playing field for patent lifetimes/etc then that will ultimately benefit companies who can point to the billion $ they spent in R&D and against the person who invented something in their garage (how important could it really be?) and doesn't know how to sell it in the patent application/etc. It's a race to the bottom at every level. Which is just an inherent problem with globalization (and the US federal system) in general. If you don't have a "minimum standard" then some places are gonna race to the bottom, and a rational actor is highly incentivized to find loopholes that let them eliminate those "minimum standards" and race to the bottom while everyone else is held to higher, more expensive standards. The court-shopping problem is really just a microcosm/toy problem of these globalization problems. Same problem, different scale.
TravelTechGuy 3y ago
It is a very sad story. Our company committed to open sourcing all of our code (it's in the web3/blockchain space), and we had, and continue to have, spirited discussions about which parts we should maybe license differently, as they contain novel IP. But my main question is: if your code is open-sourced, and the community contributed: fixes, features, actual new products - what gives you the right to close it? Are you going to go back and compensate every contributor? How can you justify revenue made on the backs of contributors. Side note: if what Prusa is alleging about Chinese patents given for open-source code produced in the west, and then having international priority, is true, I think the UN (or whoever handles international patents) should look into that. We can't control what goes on in China, but we can damn well make sure no Chines company makes money outside of China, with co-opted IP.
- traverseda 3y ago
  >if your code is open-sourced, and the community contributed: fixes, features, actual new products - what gives you the right to close it? Typically you're not able to close source existing code, once it's open it's open. What you can do is make the changes going forward proprietary. Depending on if you got a contributor-license-agreement you may not be able to close source the community contributions, but if the code was licensed under something non-viral like MIT or BSD you have as much right to close source it as literally anyone else does. I guess I really don't understand the question. You have the rights as outlined in the license, people who contribute agree to those license terms.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    There's a legal vs moral distinction there. Legally, you can generally relicense (or add licenses, at least) on permissively-licensed code, or you can force the issue by requiring a CLA that just makes you the owner of everything. However, a person could reasonably argue that you still are morally in the wrong for taking something given to you for free and charging for it.
    - traverseda 3y ago
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
> Adafruit founder Limor Fried doesn’t find much value in arguing about who is right in the clone wars. Agree wholeheartedly. The clones are here to stay. I push people, beginners especially, in the direction of Adafruit because their documentation and build quality are excellent. I also use a lot of Adafruit hardware in my own freelancing work. Their products are well worth the price premium. With the exception of M5Stack, I haven't found a product line that I think is as well thought out. That said, clones have their own place in the ecosystem. Often the differences between a cheap clone and the more expensive original are nonexistent across all axes: quality, support, documentation, etc. Most people are not going to pay more for an identical product.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Arduino is a notable exception, charging at least 10x their production cost for a dev kit. The competition was inevitable. In the case of the original Arduino, I have a Chinese clone purchased for $3 that has substantially better quality, and has many of the features you would want from a dev kit, like ESD protection on the I/O pins.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    Agreed. I used to produce a custom product that was used an Arduino Nano clone as a component on a PCB because the clone cost less than I could buy its component parts for (yay economies of scale!). I'd generally buy 10 at a time for about $25 total.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    > Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Maybe, but pre-arduino dev kits were often hundreds of dollars because doing low-volume PCB manufacturing was expensive. Now that it's cheap, Arduino is kind of obsolete.
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
pclmulqdq 3y ago
I'm just going to be the one who says it: Arduino has always been a money-grab and a grift. Open-source was just marketing for Arduino, and it worked for them when they were selling an undifferentiated dev kit for 10x the price it should actually have had (and at least a 30x markup on their actual manufacturing cost). They then load down those dev kits with software that is so inefficient that it upsells people on huge chips for problems that could otherwise be solved with a 10-cent chip. On top of that, the initial Arduino software was pretty much stolen from a grad student, who got no credit, and using open source also gave them free contributions from motivated users. Fast forward to now and they have a "community" and are trying to start selling more complicated dev kits with the same ridiculous markup, and have found themselves unable to compete with Chinese companies that charge a fair price. The end result, killing the openness, is inevitable.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I don't think that's completely right, although I'm open to parts of it. Arduino was always low-end relatively uninteresting hardware sold at a significant markup, but specifically made into a happy path that new users could easily work with, which I think actually did justify the markup. The value was never in the chips, the value was in selling premade boards that came with power regulators and serial interfaces built-in, that you could buy, plug in to your USB port (or power+serial really early on), open the Arduino IDE, follow the provided tutorials, and it worked. That said, I don't have enough perspective/knowledge to comment on their ethics, and I wouldn't be surprised either way on them actually having believed in open source or just being opportunistic. OTOH, I would easily agree that the market moved under them, because today others in the space can provide the same easy on-ramp at a lower cost with better hardware, which is leaving them flailing a bit.
  - mikepurvis 3y ago
    I think Arduino really struggles to justify its own existence in a world where RPi exists. Like, sure, there are lots of legitimate applications for microcontrollers where you need realtime or interrupts or signal generating timers or instant boot or ultra low power, but few of the common use cases (or libraries) for Arduino really corner any of that— most of it that I've seen is stuff that would make way more sense as a Python script running on a tiny Linux computer than as a microcontroller firmware.
gchadwick 3y ago
Feels like the author just sweeps the clone issues aside simply commenting they're not a problem without going into detail. Ultimately if your revenue depends upon you selling the hardware you open source it will be very hard going as other companies can easily churn out high quality (or indeed less high quality but super cheap) versions without paying any of the significant development cost and hence undercut you by a wide margin. Indeed referring to these other versions as 'clones' seems to miss the point of open source hardware, isn't the entire point making the design open so others can build and iterate upon it for whatever uses they wish (including commercial exploitation).
- AugustoCAS 3y ago
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- kiba 3y ago
  These kind of companies are often bottom feeder and often does the lowest quality they can get away with, and consequently with the lowest profit margin. It makes them fragile, and likely also a frustrating experience to deal with, since you wouldn't get support.
  - tpmoney 3y ago
    None of that really matters to a company like Prusa who has to pay salaries now, not in the future when these failed devices break and the customer is done being strung along for months. The advice to investors applies here as well, “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
kapitanjakc 3y ago
I am not at all educated on this topic, just want to understand a bit more - How does an Open source hardware company make profit? - If they do want to make profit by going closed source, what is the issue in that ? - Does it matter if they go closed source? People still figure a way out to tinker with most stuff.
- jehb 3y ago
  I'll take a swing, but I welcome additions. > How does an Open source hardware company make profit? The same way an open source software company does, which is to say, there's no definitive answer. If you're building an open source platform, you're just as likely to make a profit from something in the ecosystem around the platform as you are the platform itself. Sure, you can sell the hardware, but you're likely to make as much or more selling your expertise around the hardware, whether that's in the form of add-ons (think: open core), books and courses and training, certifications for certain compliance needs, or services customizing the platform to meet a specific need for a specific client or industry. It's worth noting that pretty much every successful open source software company targets enterprise clients. It's (sadly) very difficult to make money in the long term from consumers and hobbyists, because price is so often the deciding factor in their decision making. If you crack that nugget, you'll be among the few. > If they do want to make profit by going closed source, what is the issue in that ? Mostly, it's the backlash of a perceived bait and switch, or "openwashing" something that isn't. It's harder to track contributions for open source hardware like it is software, but it's worth noting that if a copyleft license is used, outside contributors would need to agree to the license change (if there were any outside contributors). It's also, frankly, a value add that goes away. I bought a Prusa 3D printer because of the openness. If that goes away, so too would go away my willingness to pay a premium for their product. > Does it matter if they go closed source? People still figure a way out to tinker with most stuff. It depends? One of the most important parts of open source is the ability to freely redistribute my changes. If I improve an open source product, I have a right to share my version with anyone I want, including by selling it. I may not have that right if it's closed. It's also a slippery slope. The changes hardware manufacturers make to keep people from copying their products also tend to make them harder to tinker with. Or to be sure I could get parts from a different supplier if the original maker went out of business. I'm sure others can add much more to my comments.
soulblaze3 3y ago
[flagged]
AugustoCAS 3y ago
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RobotToaster 3y ago
Prusa turning his back on open source was a massive disappointment, he built his entire company/brand on the back of the open source Reprap project (the entire point of which was to encourage people to make clones, ironically)
- bittercynic 3y ago
  Agreed, but I also have some sympathy for their position. Encouraging others to make clones had a different feel in the early days of reprap, when the industry was growing very rapidly and the extremely cheap cloners hadn't come on line yet.
  - Fomite 3y ago
    I'd be more sympathetic to it if Prusa hadn't been caught entirely flat footed by Bambu and was sitting on a pretty stale product line coasting on their reputation. I am a customer of theirs, and the last few years have been...unimpressive.
    - bittercynic 3y ago
      I'm also a customer (mk4 kit just arrived - I'm excited to build it!) and I have mixed feelings about the accusation of "coasting". Prusa seems to keep making the classic mendel design and making it better and better. Bambu does look like a pretty impressive product, but it's a major departure from what excites me about 3d printing - the devices include the user in the process. Building a kit is part of the fun, and the device's design files being available used to be a big part of Prusa's appeal to me. Bambu seems more like a consumer product, even if it's a pretty impressive one. For people who just want no-hassle printed parts, I think the Bambu looks very compelling, but it just doesn't have that reprap spirit. I've been very happy with my Prusa mk3s for the past few years, and excited to get the new one going. I'm worried about the company, though. Seems like Prusa might be on the path of becoming one of my favorite company and then running into trouble: Pebble - no explanation required. Sparkfun - New CEO took over, company stopped doing ALL the things I loved about it. Printrbot - not sure what happened there? Prusa - hopefully different!
villgax 3y ago
Likewise in software with Facebook AI releases
iancmceachern 3y ago
Wow, Eagle gets shut down, Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa all go closed source. The amazing free open hardware future we've all been promised is falling down around us. I do like Limor's response "I’m going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it,” She's fighting the good fight as always. I've been designing hardware for decades. I've come to learn that it's more about staying ahead of competitors technically than keeping them from copying you. There will always be copies, you just need to be selling the next better version while the copies are of your previous version. There is no "make a thing, profit for 20 years". If companies like prusa or sparkfun stay knowledge leaders, people will be willing to pay a few extra dollars foe their product over a clone just to have the improved support, documentation and quality, also to support what they want to support. Making this change makes these companies no different than the clones now. This move takes away incentive for me to order products from these companies and I believe will actually cause them to loose more business than they are expecting. Their whole sales model is built around this. It's why I order stuff from them, or used to.
- fragmede 3y ago
  > There is no "make a thing, profit for 20 years". The drug companies with patented medication would like to disagree. While 20 years seems a bit too long, intellectual property protection should and does exist so you can get a couple of years out of a product, and that seems okay. That some choose to go the Open Source route is their perogative. For those that don't, and make a closed source proprietary product, they're still going to get cloned if the product is popular, even with copyright and patents. (Trademark is a different story.) Look at FTDI and their USB-serial chips. Copying an IC isn't easy, can't just git clone that shit, and they still got ripped off. The story of an inventor who made a device, say, the clapper, and lived off that for the rest of his life may seem quaint, but why should it?
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    It's because they're fundamentally different things. Making and patenting a new, novel, molecule (which is what the entire pharma, materials and chemicals industries basically do at the most basic level) is very different than making a hardware product, which is yet different than making a semiconductor product, which is yet different than a software product, yet different than a genetic product. The context of this conversation is specifically a hardware product. Like so many things, it's not about what "should be" but what pragmatically falls out of the chaos of the world. These things aren't master planned by some single person in control. In reality for a hardware product, and any product in general, they say your patent portfolio is only as good as your ability to protect it. That is why these big classic chemical and pharma companies like Dow, 3M, J&J, etc. all have insanely robust patent infringement protection infrastructures in addition to their patent portfolio. In many cases those companies didn't even develop the molecule originally, they bought it. They're basically manufacturing companies with patent enforcement teams. People like me (I have many hardware patents) don't want to run manufacturing and patent lawyer companies. We want to develop new products and then sell them to the former. You say why shouldn't someone invent the clapper and then run a company that manufactures only the clapper for their whole career. I say what great inventions did society miss out on because a creative inventor was playing lawyer and manufacturing manager instead. Ultimately the answer is because different people are good at different things, at different parts of the process. Not recognizing this is to fall victim to "founders syndrome"
tedivm 3y ago
I think it's really interesting that Sparkfun is selling products that they advertise as being open source, but then refuse to actually share the source. This is pretty sketchy behavior on their part, especially since they were notified about the issue three weeks ago and still haven't fixed their website.
e28eta 3y ago
The author, Phillip Torrone, talked a little about the article during one of their live shows, starting around 12:25 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/live/EOzkO33PnrI?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/EOzkO33PnrI?feature=share
sircastor 3y ago
I feel that one of the problems with Open Source in general is that there are the terms of the license, and then there is the "good faith" expectations of the community. In the case of 3D Printers, for instance, first there is license that says "Here's the design and the software, if you make and sell something derivative, put those changes up for everyone else" But the unspoken good faith statement is "You're going to take this, and make it better, and we're all going to benefit from your efforts to make it better". The printer clones were not made with an eye towards making things better, but made with an eye toward making things cheaper, and more specifically, more profitable for the manufacturer. It could be argued that cheaper is a form of better, but I think generally the consensus is that the cheaper clones did the job less well, and the sellers already had our money.
- avmich 3y ago
  Whenever we codify something in law - and licenses are a kind of a law use - we're trying to achieve something we mean. So, in many cases in life there are words of the law - or license - and the unspoken intent. I guess you mean that the intent could be different in different cases or differently understood in the same case. Here, with 3D printers, some intended to encourage to make better printers, and some intended to allow the same quality for less, or at least to allow presenting a variety of price-quality offerings to choose from. Sellers already had our money in case we paid those sellers the same money for inferior product. The product of similar quality - even if seller managed to make it cheaper - seems fair game, and with time we'd assume the price to come down. So, we probably have a disagreement on what the intent was or is for the OSHW. For some intents the examples you give are expected.
bayindirh 3y ago
I think we're going through a recession in Free/Open Source ecosystem. Hardware and Software companies all alike trying to protect their "investments" by making things harder for other parties. Eagle, Spark Fun, Arduino, Prusa, Red Hat, SourceGraph, VSCode Plugins (was it OmniSharp), etc, etc... MIT & BSD licenses are used as a weapon against GPL more and more... Rust's "Rewrite In Rust" movement is used to replace GPL tools with MIT versions which can be closed on a whim... "{VSCode,Chrom}ium" projects give the illusion open source while being effectively used to harvest community effort, too. I don't think we're on a good track. Disturbing times.
- theragra 3y ago
  Very weird take on MIT/BSD. They cannot be closed. You can always fork.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    > You can always fork. If and only if publisher shares the source. Permissive licenses are not “viral”. Sharing the source is not mandatory. I can take your work, evolve/improve, publish a tool, and tell that the tool contains some code of you, if I don’t forget. You can fork this version as much as you like. If you can find the source, of course.
dmvdoug 3y ago
I don’t understand. These businesses gained what popularity/reach they have in large part by chanting the Open Source mantra. Then, when they’re (at least moderately?) successful, they close up and the mantra falls silent. How is that a good decision? It necessarily alienates users, who have probably come to depend upon the openness. It’s a knife in the back to the rest of the open source community. For what? More profits? But if they gained a moderately successful position through positioning themselves as open source, how are they going to profit from basically throwing up their hands and saying just kidding guys ha ha that was a mistake all along? I mean, I understand the enshittification point. Perhaps this is yet another example of that. Chalk up yet another victim to the financialization of literally everything.
- psd1 3y ago
  I suspect the salient point is that early adopters are more likely to care about openness, both practically and philosophically; but as the bell curve fattens, you include hobbyists-following-tutorials, who only care about specific practical outcomes.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    That sounds about right. But wouldn’t the increasingly non-openness affect a hobbyist’s ability to get things done (the practical side as you said, rather than the philosophical side), or does it really not matter in the end for somebody just tinkering?
snvzz 3y ago
Where Open-Source Hardware companies go opaque, it's a chance for new OSH companies to pop up and replace them. If I was ever interested in these companies, it was because I prefer OSH. Should they stop doing OSH, I'll simply look elsewhere.
Joel_Mckay 3y ago
At one time it was taboo to copy hobby kits verbatim without adding anything significant to the design. China IP address show up within weeks of starting any new small open project, and 2 months later one often sees project cloned alpha PCBs available on Ali-express/ebay/Amazon/tindie/sparkfun. The defective legacy RAMPs 1.4 with potential fire risks are still being sold a decade later. It has become such an issue, that even finding the original authors to support their projects becomes increasingly difficult as google starts to overflow with pages of SEO ad links. I wouldn't say anything has changed, but open hardware doesn't seem sustainable unless you are an active small factory in China. Good luck =)
jtode 3y ago
Black tattoo ink is cheap, especially when you're fat with capitalist juice.
alranel 3y ago
A couple facts about Arduino to make sure the discussion doesn't take weird directions: - In the last years, the Arduino team has been releasing MORE open source stuff than it had been doing in the past. This is documented transparently in the yearly open source reports: https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/ https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-sou... https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/01/20/the-2022-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/ https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/01/20/the-2022-arduino-open-sou... Even recently, the flagship Arduino product (UNO) was renewed and with no surprise it's still completely open source. - In parallel, a vertical line of industrial products (managed by a subsidiary called "Arduino Pro") was added that for documented reasons has all the requirements of open source hardware (including full schematics and fully open source software stack) except for the CAD files which are available on request. This level of openness is the same as a Raspberry Pi, if not higher because all components are available on the market. The existence of this additional product line does not imply at all that Arduino reduced its commitment to open source because, as said above, such commitment is even higher than in the past. Based on these facts, in no way it is reasonable to state that "Arduino is going closed source" or that its business is "opaque". All opinions are legit, but if they don't take facts into account it's just misinformation or marketing...

464 points by Santosh83 3y ago

This is a very well-written article by someone who is intimately knowledgeable of the history of the field. The interview with Josef Průša is particularly illuminating. It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies).

teraflop 3y ago
In case anyone else was curious, the author is Phillip Torrone. (On mobile, the byline is buried in the page footer all the way below the comments, and easy to miss.)
inconceivable 3y ago
china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. if your company is not compatible with china existing, one of these things is going away, and it isn't china. the madder you get, the less they care. they're on the other side of the planet and have their own system. they're not even thinking about you as they go about their business. i swear it's like the collective west just infinite-loops through the stages of grief when it comes to china even existing. and to those of you who think "well we have to do something about it" -- yeah, the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term.
- ChrisKnott 3y ago
  Stealing IP is basically a blue shell. At some point probably China will be leading tech innovation and the West will have little incentive to respect their patents.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - samtho 3y ago
    I just can’t see the PRC and the CCP in its current form sticking around long enough. Between their demographic collapse and pushback on globalization amongst some of the largest nations and economic zones who trade with China (not the mention China imports most of its food), we will see the CCP take an even firmer grasp just before it either collapses or disintegrates. We will likely see the largest cities revert to self-governance and then we will have a better understanding of the geopolitical landscape in which we will all operate in. If Hong Kong‘s economic and political influence positions it to self-govern once again, perhaps taking much of Guangdong with it, we may see more respect for global IP protections.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Is fragmenting into city states more likely than the CCP continuing to change, as it has over the past few decades? Chinese cultural identity, centered around Han dominance and collectivism, has been a unifying force for quite some time. HK was a major exception because of British influence, but I have a hard time seeing the rest of the country willingly breaking up rather than just slowly forcing through change.
    - inconceivable 3y ago
      ground breaking novel analysis: china is going to collapse any day now. for real this time. maybe if we keep repeating it enough, it will happen.
    - dirtyid 3y ago
      PRC global trade increased by 1 trillion with a T in the last 4 years, more than the prior 10 years. That's the greatest expansion in globalism... ever. Most with the global south, some of which is redirected trade to western block who realized they can't decouple but only derisk while the PRC has increased global integration more than... ever. Meanwhile PRC is moving from 25% skilled workforce to 60/70/80% like an advanced economy by spamming ~5M stem per year - for next 20-30 years they'll be reaping the greatest concentrated pool of skilled labour demographic dividend... also ever. Maybe post 2060s demography will be an issue like JP whose problem is they couldn't replace skilled labour at parity and even then they just merely stayed... very competitive. That's what a PRC "collapse" will look like, a massive Japan (as in multiple Japans) where median projection paints 2100 PRC as the second largest country with a skilled workforce many times larger than 2023 PRC. Conveniently, also one that doesn't have to import calories/energy. That's the problem with focusing only on the demographic pyramid and not actual demographic workforce composition. Yes PRC will have demographic challenges, but demographic trends also point toward overwhelming PRC global competitiveness and geopolitical security.
- daniel_reetz 3y ago
  Also, this is OSHW - Open Source Hardware - a _copyright_ based license, U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. Patents are a whole other subject. This article is about Open Hardware being abused, not patents. I stopped working on OSHW because it can't protect hardware. It has no legal teeth. Better to just give it away (public domain or whatever).
  - blackguardx 3y ago
    Hardware can be copyrighted, but it only protects the PCB layout.
  - kayfox 3y ago
    > U.S. copyright does not protect hardware. It does, it specifically protects chip die masks and by implication and case law protects PCB layouts and circuit diagrams.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > china is not going to ever respect western patents. people need to get this through their thick skulls. China can do whatever the f..k they want. The problem is our own governments: they could and should have sanctioned the country to oblivion... had they not foolishly tied their entire nations to the success of China. We all allowed, hell we welcomed Chinese products in our markets because our population got a decade or two of cheap Chinese made crap products which helped to hide wage stagnation (and rich CEOs getting ever richer). Then we got addicted, a ton of jobs got shipped off to China, here in Germany they stripped an entire mining facility and sent it overseas [1], and far-right parties fed themselves fat on the resulting economic devastation. And then we went even more foolish and sat idly by as our car companies completely ignored the domestic market and only focused on growing in China... with the predictable fuck-up that China learned how to make cheap EVs and now our industry is at the curb of collapsing against cheap Chinese cars and no competent competition bar Tesla. [1] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach-china.html https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach...
  - leidenfrost 3y ago
    The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. 20 years ago it "could" be justified by selling the idea that American or European labor is light years away in terms of quality compared to Chinese or any developing country's labor. And that may still be true, but the gap has shrunk in size by a lot. To the point that corporations may not want to pay 120k or 200k a year for something that can be made in a developing country for 20k a year and with ~80% of the quality.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable. The thing is, the comparatively high labor cost in Western countries is so high because we can actually have a life on it and feed a bunch of uber rich people with our labor and taxes (because guess what, people like Warren Buffett and his ilk pay a ridiculously low tax rate [1] compared to legitimately employed working class people). In contrast, China, India, Thailand or Vietnam can offer very cheap labor because for the people there even utter pittances and absolutely ridiculous exploitation are better than the life these people had before. While I do support the efforts China and India both have committed to lifting literally a billion of people out of utter poverty, it has at the same time brought disastrous consequences on our own society. I'd be happier with globalization if we had forced importers of any good to make sure that wages, labor conditions and environmental impact were on par with domestic regulations because the status quo is exploitation on all levels to benefit Western oligarchs (and imagine how the life of Chinese factory workers would be with Western wages!). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg-icahn-and-soros-pay-little-in-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg...
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  In other words, intellectual property does not work. That era ended a while ago, and the west is still playing pretend.
  - disintegore 3y ago
    It was always a farce to begin with. Inventing scarcity where there is none because there was zero willingness to organize production around anything other than markets. It was a bad but understandably necessary move back when the printing press was invented. Centuries later, with practically instant and practically infinite reproduction of most types of information, it's pure insanity.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      It was workable when there was a real cost associated with reproduction. Everyone knew it was arbitrary social scaffolding, but it was stable enough for society to keep it standing. Now that scaffold has no real foundation, save for a handful of gigantic corporations holding on as tightly as they can, and punishing anyone who dares contradict them.
  - yarg 3y ago
    It can't work if you're willing to engage with bad faith players, and are unwilling to call them out for their bullshit. China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now. Punish them for their malfeasance. The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products. Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal. Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      > call them out Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate? That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work. So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up. We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.
- oytis 3y ago
  > the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term. Come on, China was pretty irrelevant to the outside world until the US started pumping money into it in the 70s. That's exactly what the West should stop doing.
  - inconceivable 3y ago
    the reason you are so confused is because your assumption that china just popped into existence fully-formed in 1945 or whatever, is totally and utterly wrong and ignores literally hundreds if not thousands of years of relevant history. literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on.
    - cracrecry 3y ago
      >literally everyone has tried to take over china (modern translation: "access their markets"), from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on. China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. To portray Chinese like saints or victims is not knowing about the thousands of years you talk about.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        > China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese. Uhm... You clearly have no idea about China. First, it was _itself_ conquered by Mongols ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China ). Who were then simply assimilated. Second, China has never conquered Japan. Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
        disintegore 3y ago
josephcsible 3y ago
> China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). I wish Western countries had import bans on goods manufactured by Chinese companies that did that.
- impalallama 3y ago
  It’s happened but only on highly strategically important stuff like microprocessors
eropple 3y ago
So...the thing is, the real competitors to the Prusa i3 printers are open-source. Like, actually. The Sovol SV06 is a Chinese printer very clearly based on the Prusa i3 heritage. It's an excellent alternative to the MK3S+ and the firmware source and CAD designs are on GitHub. There are definitely budget-range 3D printers with an i3 heritage (probably not derived tightly from the Prusa design, a lot of them seem like the product of one engineer and a disassembled Ender 3), but the SV06 is for my money the one to get, and it's a quarter of the price of an MK3S+, without the bizarre-in-2023 "preassembled" option that's table stakes for everybody else. The bigger problem seems to be that the i3 printers are table stakes now, while Prusa engine seized up and forward progress went to pot. The Prusa XL is not vaporware but it's close and preposterously expensive, while the MK4 released without input shaping in their extremely customized port of Marlin. Those "Chinese knockoffs" are shipping Klipper-based printers, with SBCs, where you get that for free. And then you have the Bambu printers, which are OSS-compliant where required (their slicer is a derivative of PrusaSlicer) but built an in-house OS (not actually that shocking, and almost certainly not pirated; 3D printers just aren't that hard) that has given them a printer that's conservatively 18-24 months ahead of everybody except maybe Prusa with the XL. I really don't like Bambu's patent saber-rattling, that sucks, but they just shipped a better mousetrap, too. Open-source 3D printing is on the ropes because it isn't making stuff as good as the closed-source stuff. Not because of cheap cloners. I didn't want to buy a Bambu printer so held out for the Creality K1 (and they are being bad citizens, they haven't released their Klipper source) and it's not good, I waited for Prusa to sell me on a Prusa XL but to get one I'll be waiting until 2024 at the earliest and spending $500 on that "preassembled" option to boot, and...Bambu just sold me a P1S with an AMS for $1000 flat. C'mon.
- wasted_intel 3y ago
  > which are OSS-compliant where required This is the crux of the problem. Where Prusa is openly sharing, you have companies that are benefiting from that without reciprocating. Part of the tax you're paying when buying an i3MK4 is the continued investment in the open source/hardware contributions of the company, not just the end product. Shelling out $1k for a Bambu is your prerogative, but it does cast a vote with your wallet for a company that is more predatory than collaborative.
tmchu 3y ago
>It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). Why is this China factor even a problem for open-source? The open source community have always been threaten by closed-source copycat. Even western companies also do that without much repercussion. The real threat is, as the article pointed out, the trend of `open source` companies going closed source because of profit motive.
- nyolfen 3y ago
  prusa describes the issue as being that chinese enterprises file for bogus patents in china at scale based on open source work, and due to trade agreements the patents can be extended to other countries. even if the patents are bogus they could still file suit to crush western competitors at home by wasting resources, and they have state backing/funding
  - tmchu 3y ago
    Again, litigation and patent trolls are nothing new to the community. Claiming China in this case sounds like a crutch to wash off their own image after doing fishy thing themselves.
  - eropple 3y ago
    Prusa's primary opponent in this space would be Bambu--who, to be clear, are rattling their saber about patents, and they suck for that. They also have a better, faster printer that has its full feature set available on release, and Prusa does not. I am more annoyed that Prusa is doing a bad job of shepherding open source and shipping bad products than that Bambu has a closed-source better one.
    - chaxor 3y ago
      This is very close to the academia/industry divide. Academia (the public) spends an enormous amount of money investing in research to discover something novel and effective, or makes a large efficiency gain. Industry reads that, and implements it, with some minor tweaks. This, products are made for fractions of the cost it would have otherwise cost to make, with large improvements over previous capabilities, due to the work done in the public sphere. Effectively very similar to open and closed source.
gchadwick 3y ago
Are the Chinese companies actually persuing IP claims? What it says about patents is concerning but there's no concrete example of practical issues from it so far. If a Chinese company simply makes and sells a version of an open source design are they doing anything wrong? This is allowed by the licensing terms.
- nyolfen 3y ago
  per prusa's comments in the article, they are filing patents based on open source work at scale
  - eropple 3y ago
    Patents, yes. Deployed patents, not to date. I have only marginal sympathy for Prusa when they aren't shipping things people want to buy.
- Fomite 3y ago
  Bambu has been saber rattling. Ironically, I think it's less aimed at Prusa and more at their own Chinese knock-off competitors.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies). The problem is rather the customers who buy China stuff instead of products from companies from western countries.
disintegore 3y ago
There's something I'm just not getting with Prusa's justification. With open hardware, anyone can take your designs and run with them. Not just Chinese companies with zero regard for IP law. There is no IP to have regard for. Mercantilist policies in China should affect all western companies in that market more or less the same. I am not seeing how relicensing will make Prusa3D's business more viable.
- karurosu 3y ago
  The problem is not stealing the design, the problem is stealing the design, getting a patent based on it then suing you. Even if its obviously a bogus patent the cost and time required to fight it off can kill your company.
blitzar 3y ago
https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53 https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88... "The upstart nation was a den of intellectual piracy. One of its top officials urged his countrymen to steal and copy foreign machinery. Across the ocean, a leading industrial power tried in vain to guard its trade secrets from the brash young rival. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rogue nation was the United States."

h2odragon 3y ago

Go back to the start of Intellectual Property law. Patents are supposed to be a deal between the inventor and society, inventors get rich for 17 years of exclusivity then the public gets to have the whole design available to use. Fair deal. What we have now is not a fair deal, to the point that people are trying to re-invent the notions that the laws were originally supposed to embody.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
one I first started coming online, there was no "intellectual property law" what there was: trademark law, copyright law, and patent law. but 3 turn to 1?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- technothrasher 3y ago
  You were online in the 1960s? The term "intellectual property law" started to be commonly used after the formation of the World Intellectual Property Organization in 1967.
  - andyinfrance 3y ago
    Hi Technothrasher, sorry to jump this thread, was reading about a thread 46 days ago where you have made ecu replacements for 308’s I presume that’s with the Bosch K-Jetronic and Magneti Marelli 801/802a ecu’s? Can you contact me about these I’m interested, thanks
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    an international organizaion does not pass laws in any country. NGOs such as that one (which I admit did not know existed) influence countries into shifting their laws over a long time when I stared coming online, national talk about IP laws was just starting out. I don't keep up to date with law reforms, but in the late 90s mainstream awareness was shifting into this mindset of IP law. and back then, the law still spoke of those 3 concepts on their own. I suppose now it's really just one blob of ownership over ideas for the sake of some misguided market-ideology

buildbot 3y ago

Shouldn’t any international patent office reject these suspect patents based of open source software and hardware? Also, why does for example, US customs not step in and enforce stopping the importation of infringing devices? They seem to be happy to do that to sparkfun before, seizing one of their shipments https://hackaday.com/2014/03/20/fluke-issues-statement-regarding-sparkfuns-impounded-multimeters/ https://hackaday.com/2014/03/20/fluke-issues-statement-regar...

Palomides 3y ago
at least the US patent office takes a pretty weak "let the courts figure it out" approach, and I think customs enforcement is pretty similar in that it has to be prompted to act (actually checking every shipment for every possible violation seems impossible anyway)
toast0 3y ago
Patent offices can check whatever resources they want in terms of finding prior art. But in practice, they mostly just check patent applications, because they have a big database of those.
- varispeed 3y ago
  But they don't do that. Basically as it seems most patents, however ridiculous, get accepted and idea is that the real test for patent is when someone "breaches" it and it goes to court.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's open patent. Sure there's prior art which can prevent someone from creating a patent but if you actually want to guarantee that somebody doesn't patent your work, the path to do that is to file a patent yourself and open that patent up with patentleft (the patent analog for copyleft) or some other open patent. Yes filing patents can be expensive but for these companies it shouldn't be an issue and if they truly are a tiny org without the capabilities to file as a standard org, they can file under the small entity or micro entity fee schedules which are far cheaper.

paulkrush 3y ago

I want a new or more terms for this. Open source hardware kinda implies it's a legal catagory. It's a dream, and way to be social, not a legal thing. I am begining to like "DIY" better. As "This is hardware that is standard and easy to copy." Because it's so easy to copy and everybody does, it's easy to live in this world. I need to process this thought more. Also I am using the word hardware to imply mecanical design. I think it's easier to have open source hardware if you are taking about pcb boards.

mcdonje 3y ago

Open source projects with permissive licenses are subject to this kind of abuse by companies who benefit from the community and then wall off their derivative projects without paying the community back by way of contributions. I do think there's a place for permissive licenses, particularly for academic and government projects. However, it seems like private entities can't be trusted to play nice, so copyleft licenses should probably be used by more open source projects to protect the public knowledge base.

andy99 3y ago
Copyleft is good for "complete" products, where you want to protect a derivative work from being walled off. It's harder to know the best way to handle modules (which might be the more common case in hardware) where a viral license can make using them impractical.
- jacooper 3y ago
  LGPL then

unintendedcons 3y ago

Chinese practices poisoning the well for everybody, again?

undersuit 3y ago
Why did we make a well with a button on it that says "don't press; releases poison"?
- jimmyk2 3y ago
  The button spits out 1/10 of 1¢ every time it is pressed. The man pressing the button has his own reservoir of clean water.
mcdonje 3y ago
China is hardly alone in patent-trolling and government subsidized predatory pricing. The boogyman narrative is a bit of a red herring. Our patent system is broken. Our copyright system is broken. IP laws stifle innovation and are abused by public and private entities. China is just currently abusing fundamentally flawed systems better than everyone else.

pierat 3y ago

> Last year (2022) Arduino took in a Series B funding round of $32 million. [link:https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/07/series-b-funding-round-of-32-million-for-arduino/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/07/series-b-funding-round-...] > [quote from the link] “So today, we dial up our vision for universal innovation with a clear strategy to expand our portfolio for professionals, supported by a Series B funding round of $32 million led by the global deep tech investor Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), joined by Renesas, Anzu Partners, and Arm.” Remember folks, "VC's rhyme with feces". They will enshittify your business faster than every toilet being used during the Super Bowl. Arduino is the latest casualty.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago
Arduino has basically dominated every place where someone first touches a microcontroller. Schools and most early learners buy legit arduinos. Why did they need VC funding?
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Greed.
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Zero empathy then. Imagine the actual innovation we'd see with actual lawless ip laws. Everyone iterating from everyone else. It's how china caught up and in some areas surpassed. Maybe our IP model is just weights on a runner's ankles.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      iirc a recent study suggested that there is no measurable social benefit (eg, increase in rate of innovation) from patents, but I can't immediately find a source for that. But generally everyone has this idea of the scrappy inventor in their garage inventing the flux capacitor and that's not really how it works, patents are like H1-Bs, they are a thing that benefits the companies with enough scale and legal resources to lobby and work the system. And those guys are gonna be fine regardless. it's unsurprising though because in general even in the happy case, you have locked an invention to a single company for 28 years and that's an eternity in the modern era. And future slight improvements effectively refresh/evergreen the patent, because there's usually only a couple viable ways of doing something. I think of this as the "e-ink" scenario, where there's this fantastic tech that's locked to a company that wants to work out recurring-revenue licensing models for hundreds of dollars per device per year and such, and slow-walks innovation secure in the knowledge that if a competitor does appear that they not only have years of head-start but could sqush them in litigation. Then in the unhappy case you've got the places that get a patent for "updates delivered over the internet" or "e-commerce on a website" like the one that tried to shake down newegg. Most companies will just pay up rather than fight it on principle, regardless of how egregious the patent is. And such patents obviously should never be issued but the patent office don't care and the legal system allows jurisdiction-shopping that ensure that once issued, the patents will find a sympathetic venue in a red state that's happy to rake in the court fees. Imagine if it's your small LLC that gets targeted instead of a company like Newegg with enough resources to fight, this is a huge instance of that "big companies exploit the system to squash smaller upstarts" failure mode that reduces innovation. and really the existence of the system at all essentially ensures at least some friction loss of innovation due to the mere possibility of problem B occurring. Let alone in systems (like ours) where it actually does occur frequently and blatantly. even when it is not flagrantly obvious like the above-mentioned (real, issued) patents, the standard of "not obvious to a skilled practioner in the art" is not really being enforced, or an incredibly low bar of "not obvious" is being utilized (de facto it only seems to mean prior art). A shit-ton of these things are things that would be obvious to any engineer that sat down and worked whatever problem through. If it's going to exist, it ideally would be very narrowly targeted, and perhaps even the patent duration and terms should be customized to the significance and innovativeness of the invention. If you invent a cancer drug and take it through trials that should be handled differently than "3d printer but with a different kind of head inspired by a pastry machine that builds a print 10% better" or whatever. unfortunately if you remove the patent system that actually disadvantages you internationally, because you didn't patent your thing! And of course it's against the international treaties/etc (which we wrote and could change but still). Again, this actually prevents you from even toning down the abuse of the system because if a US patent is harder to get than any other, you are just disadvantaging US companies. And if you create an uneven playing field for patent lifetimes/etc then that will ultimately benefit companies who can point to the billion $ they spent in R&D and against the person who invented something in their garage (how important could it really be?) and doesn't know how to sell it in the patent application/etc. It's a race to the bottom at every level. Which is just an inherent problem with globalization (and the US federal system) in general. If you don't have a "minimum standard" then some places are gonna race to the bottom, and a rational actor is highly incentivized to find loopholes that let them eliminate those "minimum standards" and race to the bottom while everyone else is held to higher, more expensive standards. The court-shopping problem is really just a microcosm/toy problem of these globalization problems. Same problem, different scale.

TravelTechGuy 3y ago

It is a very sad story. Our company committed to open sourcing all of our code (it's in the web3/blockchain space), and we had, and continue to have, spirited discussions about which parts we should maybe license differently, as they contain novel IP. But my main question is: if your code is open-sourced, and the community contributed: fixes, features, actual new products - what gives you the right to close it? Are you going to go back and compensate every contributor? How can you justify revenue made on the backs of contributors. Side note: if what Prusa is alleging about Chinese patents given for open-source code produced in the west, and then having international priority, is true, I think the UN (or whoever handles international patents) should look into that. We can't control what goes on in China, but we can damn well make sure no Chines company makes money outside of China, with co-opted IP.

traverseda 3y ago
>if your code is open-sourced, and the community contributed: fixes, features, actual new products - what gives you the right to close it? Typically you're not able to close source existing code, once it's open it's open. What you can do is make the changes going forward proprietary. Depending on if you got a contributor-license-agreement you may not be able to close source the community contributions, but if the code was licensed under something non-viral like MIT or BSD you have as much right to close source it as literally anyone else does. I guess I really don't understand the question. You have the rights as outlined in the license, people who contribute agree to those license terms.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  There's a legal vs moral distinction there. Legally, you can generally relicense (or add licenses, at least) on permissively-licensed code, or you can force the issue by requiring a CLA that just makes you the owner of everything. However, a person could reasonably argue that you still are morally in the wrong for taking something given to you for free and charging for it.
  - traverseda 3y ago

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago

> Adafruit founder Limor Fried doesn’t find much value in arguing about who is right in the clone wars. Agree wholeheartedly. The clones are here to stay. I push people, beginners especially, in the direction of Adafruit because their documentation and build quality are excellent. I also use a lot of Adafruit hardware in my own freelancing work. Their products are well worth the price premium. With the exception of M5Stack, I haven't found a product line that I think is as well thought out. That said, clones have their own place in the ecosystem. Often the differences between a cheap clone and the more expensive original are nonexistent across all axes: quality, support, documentation, etc. Most people are not going to pay more for an identical product.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Arduino is a notable exception, charging at least 10x their production cost for a dev kit. The competition was inevitable. In the case of the original Arduino, I have a Chinese clone purchased for $3 that has substantially better quality, and has many of the features you would want from a dev kit, like ESD protection on the I/O pins.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  Agreed. I used to produce a custom product that was used an Arduino Nano clone as a component on a PCB because the clone cost less than I could buy its component parts for (yay economies of scale!). I'd generally buy 10 at a time for about $25 total.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Maybe, but pre-arduino dev kits were often hundreds of dollars because doing low-volume PCB manufacturing was expensive. Now that it's cheap, Arduino is kind of obsolete.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago

pclmulqdq 3y ago

I'm just going to be the one who says it: Arduino has always been a money-grab and a grift. Open-source was just marketing for Arduino, and it worked for them when they were selling an undifferentiated dev kit for 10x the price it should actually have had (and at least a 30x markup on their actual manufacturing cost). They then load down those dev kits with software that is so inefficient that it upsells people on huge chips for problems that could otherwise be solved with a 10-cent chip. On top of that, the initial Arduino software was pretty much stolen from a grad student, who got no credit, and using open source also gave them free contributions from motivated users. Fast forward to now and they have a "community" and are trying to start selling more complicated dev kits with the same ridiculous markup, and have found themselves unable to compete with Chinese companies that charge a fair price. The end result, killing the openness, is inevitable.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I don't think that's completely right, although I'm open to parts of it. Arduino was always low-end relatively uninteresting hardware sold at a significant markup, but specifically made into a happy path that new users could easily work with, which I think actually did justify the markup. The value was never in the chips, the value was in selling premade boards that came with power regulators and serial interfaces built-in, that you could buy, plug in to your USB port (or power+serial really early on), open the Arduino IDE, follow the provided tutorials, and it worked. That said, I don't have enough perspective/knowledge to comment on their ethics, and I wouldn't be surprised either way on them actually having believed in open source or just being opportunistic. OTOH, I would easily agree that the market moved under them, because today others in the space can provide the same easy on-ramp at a lower cost with better hardware, which is leaving them flailing a bit.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  I think Arduino really struggles to justify its own existence in a world where RPi exists. Like, sure, there are lots of legitimate applications for microcontrollers where you need realtime or interrupts or signal generating timers or instant boot or ultra low power, but few of the common use cases (or libraries) for Arduino really corner any of that— most of it that I've seen is stuff that would make way more sense as a Python script running on a tiny Linux computer than as a microcontroller firmware.

gchadwick 3y ago

Feels like the author just sweeps the clone issues aside simply commenting they're not a problem without going into detail. Ultimately if your revenue depends upon you selling the hardware you open source it will be very hard going as other companies can easily churn out high quality (or indeed less high quality but super cheap) versions without paying any of the significant development cost and hence undercut you by a wide margin. Indeed referring to these other versions as 'clones' seems to miss the point of open source hardware, isn't the entire point making the design open so others can build and iterate upon it for whatever uses they wish (including commercial exploitation).

AugustoCAS 3y ago
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kiba 3y ago
These kind of companies are often bottom feeder and often does the lowest quality they can get away with, and consequently with the lowest profit margin. It makes them fragile, and likely also a frustrating experience to deal with, since you wouldn't get support.
- tpmoney 3y ago
  None of that really matters to a company like Prusa who has to pay salaries now, not in the future when these failed devices break and the customer is done being strung along for months. The advice to investors applies here as well, “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”

kapitanjakc 3y ago

I am not at all educated on this topic, just want to understand a bit more - How does an Open source hardware company make profit? - If they do want to make profit by going closed source, what is the issue in that ? - Does it matter if they go closed source? People still figure a way out to tinker with most stuff.

jehb 3y ago
I'll take a swing, but I welcome additions. > How does an Open source hardware company make profit? The same way an open source software company does, which is to say, there's no definitive answer. If you're building an open source platform, you're just as likely to make a profit from something in the ecosystem around the platform as you are the platform itself. Sure, you can sell the hardware, but you're likely to make as much or more selling your expertise around the hardware, whether that's in the form of add-ons (think: open core), books and courses and training, certifications for certain compliance needs, or services customizing the platform to meet a specific need for a specific client or industry. It's worth noting that pretty much every successful open source software company targets enterprise clients. It's (sadly) very difficult to make money in the long term from consumers and hobbyists, because price is so often the deciding factor in their decision making. If you crack that nugget, you'll be among the few. > If they do want to make profit by going closed source, what is the issue in that ? Mostly, it's the backlash of a perceived bait and switch, or "openwashing" something that isn't. It's harder to track contributions for open source hardware like it is software, but it's worth noting that if a copyleft license is used, outside contributors would need to agree to the license change (if there were any outside contributors). It's also, frankly, a value add that goes away. I bought a Prusa 3D printer because of the openness. If that goes away, so too would go away my willingness to pay a premium for their product. > Does it matter if they go closed source? People still figure a way out to tinker with most stuff. It depends? One of the most important parts of open source is the ability to freely redistribute my changes. If I improve an open source product, I have a right to share my version with anyone I want, including by selling it. I may not have that right if it's closed. It's also a slippery slope. The changes hardware manufacturers make to keep people from copying their products also tend to make them harder to tinker with. Or to be sure I could get parts from a different supplier if the original maker went out of business. I'm sure others can add much more to my comments.

soulblaze3 3y ago

[flagged]

AugustoCAS 3y ago

[dead]

RobotToaster 3y ago

Prusa turning his back on open source was a massive disappointment, he built his entire company/brand on the back of the open source Reprap project (the entire point of which was to encourage people to make clones, ironically)

bittercynic 3y ago
Agreed, but I also have some sympathy for their position. Encouraging others to make clones had a different feel in the early days of reprap, when the industry was growing very rapidly and the extremely cheap cloners hadn't come on line yet.
- Fomite 3y ago
  I'd be more sympathetic to it if Prusa hadn't been caught entirely flat footed by Bambu and was sitting on a pretty stale product line coasting on their reputation. I am a customer of theirs, and the last few years have been...unimpressive.
  - bittercynic 3y ago
    I'm also a customer (mk4 kit just arrived - I'm excited to build it!) and I have mixed feelings about the accusation of "coasting". Prusa seems to keep making the classic mendel design and making it better and better. Bambu does look like a pretty impressive product, but it's a major departure from what excites me about 3d printing - the devices include the user in the process. Building a kit is part of the fun, and the device's design files being available used to be a big part of Prusa's appeal to me. Bambu seems more like a consumer product, even if it's a pretty impressive one. For people who just want no-hassle printed parts, I think the Bambu looks very compelling, but it just doesn't have that reprap spirit. I've been very happy with my Prusa mk3s for the past few years, and excited to get the new one going. I'm worried about the company, though. Seems like Prusa might be on the path of becoming one of my favorite company and then running into trouble: Pebble - no explanation required. Sparkfun - New CEO took over, company stopped doing ALL the things I loved about it. Printrbot - not sure what happened there? Prusa - hopefully different!

villgax 3y ago

Likewise in software with Facebook AI releases

iancmceachern 3y ago

Wow, Eagle gets shut down, Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa all go closed source. The amazing free open hardware future we've all been promised is falling down around us. I do like Limor's response "I’m going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it,” She's fighting the good fight as always. I've been designing hardware for decades. I've come to learn that it's more about staying ahead of competitors technically than keeping them from copying you. There will always be copies, you just need to be selling the next better version while the copies are of your previous version. There is no "make a thing, profit for 20 years". If companies like prusa or sparkfun stay knowledge leaders, people will be willing to pay a few extra dollars foe their product over a clone just to have the improved support, documentation and quality, also to support what they want to support. Making this change makes these companies no different than the clones now. This move takes away incentive for me to order products from these companies and I believe will actually cause them to loose more business than they are expecting. Their whole sales model is built around this. It's why I order stuff from them, or used to.

fragmede 3y ago
> There is no "make a thing, profit for 20 years". The drug companies with patented medication would like to disagree. While 20 years seems a bit too long, intellectual property protection should and does exist so you can get a couple of years out of a product, and that seems okay. That some choose to go the Open Source route is their perogative. For those that don't, and make a closed source proprietary product, they're still going to get cloned if the product is popular, even with copyright and patents. (Trademark is a different story.) Look at FTDI and their USB-serial chips. Copying an IC isn't easy, can't just git clone that shit, and they still got ripped off. The story of an inventor who made a device, say, the clapper, and lived off that for the rest of his life may seem quaint, but why should it?
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  It's because they're fundamentally different things. Making and patenting a new, novel, molecule (which is what the entire pharma, materials and chemicals industries basically do at the most basic level) is very different than making a hardware product, which is yet different than making a semiconductor product, which is yet different than a software product, yet different than a genetic product. The context of this conversation is specifically a hardware product. Like so many things, it's not about what "should be" but what pragmatically falls out of the chaos of the world. These things aren't master planned by some single person in control. In reality for a hardware product, and any product in general, they say your patent portfolio is only as good as your ability to protect it. That is why these big classic chemical and pharma companies like Dow, 3M, J&J, etc. all have insanely robust patent infringement protection infrastructures in addition to their patent portfolio. In many cases those companies didn't even develop the molecule originally, they bought it. They're basically manufacturing companies with patent enforcement teams. People like me (I have many hardware patents) don't want to run manufacturing and patent lawyer companies. We want to develop new products and then sell them to the former. You say why shouldn't someone invent the clapper and then run a company that manufactures only the clapper for their whole career. I say what great inventions did society miss out on because a creative inventor was playing lawyer and manufacturing manager instead. Ultimately the answer is because different people are good at different things, at different parts of the process. Not recognizing this is to fall victim to "founders syndrome"

tedivm 3y ago

I think it's really interesting that Sparkfun is selling products that they advertise as being open source, but then refuse to actually share the source. This is pretty sketchy behavior on their part, especially since they were notified about the issue three weeks ago and still haven't fixed their website.

e28eta 3y ago

The author, Phillip Torrone, talked a little about the article during one of their live shows, starting around 12:25 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/live/EOzkO33PnrI?feature=share https://www.youtube.com/live/EOzkO33PnrI?feature=share

sircastor 3y ago

I feel that one of the problems with Open Source in general is that there are the terms of the license, and then there is the "good faith" expectations of the community. In the case of 3D Printers, for instance, first there is license that says "Here's the design and the software, if you make and sell something derivative, put those changes up for everyone else" But the unspoken good faith statement is "You're going to take this, and make it better, and we're all going to benefit from your efforts to make it better". The printer clones were not made with an eye towards making things better, but made with an eye toward making things cheaper, and more specifically, more profitable for the manufacturer. It could be argued that cheaper is a form of better, but I think generally the consensus is that the cheaper clones did the job less well, and the sellers already had our money.

avmich 3y ago
Whenever we codify something in law - and licenses are a kind of a law use - we're trying to achieve something we mean. So, in many cases in life there are words of the law - or license - and the unspoken intent. I guess you mean that the intent could be different in different cases or differently understood in the same case. Here, with 3D printers, some intended to encourage to make better printers, and some intended to allow the same quality for less, or at least to allow presenting a variety of price-quality offerings to choose from. Sellers already had our money in case we paid those sellers the same money for inferior product. The product of similar quality - even if seller managed to make it cheaper - seems fair game, and with time we'd assume the price to come down. So, we probably have a disagreement on what the intent was or is for the OSHW. For some intents the examples you give are expected.

bayindirh 3y ago

I think we're going through a recession in Free/Open Source ecosystem. Hardware and Software companies all alike trying to protect their "investments" by making things harder for other parties. Eagle, Spark Fun, Arduino, Prusa, Red Hat, SourceGraph, VSCode Plugins (was it OmniSharp), etc, etc... MIT & BSD licenses are used as a weapon against GPL more and more... Rust's "Rewrite In Rust" movement is used to replace GPL tools with MIT versions which can be closed on a whim... "{VSCode,Chrom}ium" projects give the illusion open source while being effectively used to harvest community effort, too. I don't think we're on a good track. Disturbing times.

theragra 3y ago
Very weird take on MIT/BSD. They cannot be closed. You can always fork.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  > You can always fork. If and only if publisher shares the source. Permissive licenses are not “viral”. Sharing the source is not mandatory. I can take your work, evolve/improve, publish a tool, and tell that the tool contains some code of you, if I don’t forget. You can fork this version as much as you like. If you can find the source, of course.

dmvdoug 3y ago

I don’t understand. These businesses gained what popularity/reach they have in large part by chanting the Open Source mantra. Then, when they’re (at least moderately?) successful, they close up and the mantra falls silent. How is that a good decision? It necessarily alienates users, who have probably come to depend upon the openness. It’s a knife in the back to the rest of the open source community. For what? More profits? But if they gained a moderately successful position through positioning themselves as open source, how are they going to profit from basically throwing up their hands and saying just kidding guys ha ha that was a mistake all along? I mean, I understand the enshittification point. Perhaps this is yet another example of that. Chalk up yet another victim to the financialization of literally everything.

psd1 3y ago
I suspect the salient point is that early adopters are more likely to care about openness, both practically and philosophically; but as the bell curve fattens, you include hobbyists-following-tutorials, who only care about specific practical outcomes.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  That sounds about right. But wouldn’t the increasingly non-openness affect a hobbyist’s ability to get things done (the practical side as you said, rather than the philosophical side), or does it really not matter in the end for somebody just tinkering?

snvzz 3y ago

Where Open-Source Hardware companies go opaque, it's a chance for new OSH companies to pop up and replace them. If I was ever interested in these companies, it was because I prefer OSH. Should they stop doing OSH, I'll simply look elsewhere.

Joel_Mckay 3y ago

At one time it was taboo to copy hobby kits verbatim without adding anything significant to the design. China IP address show up within weeks of starting any new small open project, and 2 months later one often sees project cloned alpha PCBs available on Ali-express/ebay/Amazon/tindie/sparkfun. The defective legacy RAMPs 1.4 with potential fire risks are still being sold a decade later. It has become such an issue, that even finding the original authors to support their projects becomes increasingly difficult as google starts to overflow with pages of SEO ad links. I wouldn't say anything has changed, but open hardware doesn't seem sustainable unless you are an active small factory in China. Good luck =)

jtode 3y ago

Black tattoo ink is cheap, especially when you're fat with capitalist juice.

alranel 3y ago

A couple facts about Arduino to make sure the discussion doesn't take weird directions: - In the last years, the Arduino team has been releasing MORE open source stuff than it had been doing in the past. This is documented transparently in the yearly open source reports: https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/ https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-sou... https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/01/20/the-2022-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/ https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/01/20/the-2022-arduino-open-sou... Even recently, the flagship Arduino product (UNO) was renewed and with no surprise it's still completely open source. - In parallel, a vertical line of industrial products (managed by a subsidiary called "Arduino Pro") was added that for documented reasons has all the requirements of open source hardware (including full schematics and fully open source software stack) except for the CAD files which are available on request. This level of openness is the same as a Raspberry Pi, if not higher because all components are available on the market. The existence of this additional product line does not imply at all that Arduino reduced its commitment to open source because, as said above, such commitment is even higher than in the past. Based on these facts, in no way it is reasonable to state that "Arduino is going closed source" or that its business is "opaque". All opinions are legit, but if they don't take facts into account it's just misinformation or marketing...