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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 arou

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"
  - gary_0 3y ago
    AFAIK the "manufacture a new molecule" part, or even the "find a molecule that looks likely to treat a disease" part, is in practice not even the main expense the patent secures; it's the "convince the FDA that the molecule is safe and effective" part, which is less engineering and more procedural/bureaucratic, and it takes the most time and money (after marketing expenses).
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      The FDA part is indeed expensive, and is a major part of the cost in what I do too (medical devices, hardware), but often these molecules are the result of decades of research. It's not really the case, the FDA part is hard, and takes years, but the molecule part often is even harder and takes even longer, costing even more.
      - gary_0 3y ago
        I'm not trying to say the "molecule" part is easy (heck no!) just that the business of drug patents is another kind of ballgame entirely. Also, just about any innovation in any technical field has decades of research behind it, no? (I have worked at a medical devices company as well, but a few steps removed from anything that poked a human.)
        iancmceachern 3y ago
        Not really. The design cycle for hardware products is typically 6 months to 2 years maximum. Moat consumer products get refreshed pr redesigned every year, typically to coincide with CES and other things like the holiday rush. Same with the toy industry, there is a big annual show that you need to release your toy at or you wait to next year. In medical devices it's a bit longer, 2-3 years is common. If you take much longer than that to bring the product to market you have to start redesigning the stuff you designed first. Components go obsolete, computers and displays change every year, software needs to be patched. It's why programs like the f35 and f22 are such messes, they were designed over a decade. Most hardware products we interact with daily took less than 3 years to design and bring to market, they are not F22s. Some things take longer like an MRI machine but they typically are done in a iterative way so that proved versions of a product are brought out every year or two.
cracrecry 3y ago
As a hardware maker company entrepreneur myself(not open source), I agree with what you say, BUT with open hardware they can copy you faster in China than what you can manufacture on Europe and the US. No way you can compete with Chinese giving out your source code that took years to create so they can copy your product in weeks.
petsfed 3y ago
I mean, some of this devolves down to the nature of the tools. Eagle was garbage, we all knew it, but it was free and relatively easy to get started on, so everybody in the OSHW movement used it. What we should've done was commit to KiCad early on, so there never was this closed-source element in the chain looming over the whole project. I think open-source is a laudable goal, but your competitors have to be willing to play by the same rules, otherwise you're hobbling yourself. I worked at an agriculture startup some years ago, and while we all wanted the gizmos to be hackable for our customers, we all knew that if we opened things too much, a real heavy like John Deere, Monsanto, or Simplot would swoop in, leverage their existing logistics and customer base, and put us out of business the instant we had a product valuable enough to steal. I don't like that e.g. Sparkfun is putting out a product that's worth more on its own than as a learning tool, so I agree with you. This signals a shift in Sparkfun overall that I don't like.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Totally. The challenge was Kicad wasn't very usable early on, it's amazing now, but it wasn't really usable for a long while and the only name in town that wasn't thousands of Dollars was eagle. It was also the defacto standard for library and Footprint files, it defined its own little ecosystem. Now we have similar in kicad, but it will take years to amas the level of example boards out there in eagle.

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"
- gary_0 3y ago
  AFAIK the "manufacture a new molecule" part, or even the "find a molecule that looks likely to treat a disease" part, is in practice not even the main expense the patent secures; it's the "convince the FDA that the molecule is safe and effective" part, which is less engineering and more procedural/bureaucratic, and it takes the most time and money (after marketing expenses).
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    The FDA part is indeed expensive, and is a major part of the cost in what I do too (medical devices, hardware), but often these molecules are the result of decades of research. It's not really the case, the FDA part is hard, and takes years, but the molecule part often is even harder and takes even longer, costing even more.
    - gary_0 3y ago
      I'm not trying to say the "molecule" part is easy (heck no!) just that the business of drug patents is another kind of ballgame entirely. Also, just about any innovation in any technical field has decades of research behind it, no? (I have worked at a medical devices company as well, but a few steps removed from anything that poked a human.)
      - iancmceachern 3y ago
        Not really. The design cycle for hardware products is typically 6 months to 2 years maximum. Moat consumer products get refreshed pr redesigned every year, typically to coincide with CES and other things like the holiday rush. Same with the toy industry, there is a big annual show that you need to release your toy at or you wait to next year. In medical devices it's a bit longer, 2-3 years is common. If you take much longer than that to bring the product to market you have to start redesigning the stuff you designed first. Components go obsolete, computers and displays change every year, software needs to be patched. It's why programs like the f35 and f22 are such messes, they were designed over a decade. Most hardware products we interact with daily took less than 3 years to design and bring to market, they are not F22s. Some things take longer like an MRI machine but they typically are done in a iterative way so that proved versions of a product are brought out every year or two.

cracrecry 3y ago

As a hardware maker company entrepreneur myself(not open source), I agree with what you say, BUT with open hardware they can copy you faster in China than what you can manufacture on Europe and the US. No way you can compete with Chinese giving out your source code that took years to create so they can copy your product in weeks.

petsfed 3y ago

I mean, some of this devolves down to the nature of the tools. Eagle was garbage, we all knew it, but it was free and relatively easy to get started on, so everybody in the OSHW movement used it. What we should've done was commit to KiCad early on, so there never was this closed-source element in the chain looming over the whole project. I think open-source is a laudable goal, but your competitors have to be willing to play by the same rules, otherwise you're hobbling yourself. I worked at an agriculture startup some years ago, and while we all wanted the gizmos to be hackable for our customers, we all knew that if we opened things too much, a real heavy like John Deere, Monsanto, or Simplot would swoop in, leverage their existing logistics and customer base, and put us out of business the instant we had a product valuable enough to steal. I don't like that e.g. Sparkfun is putting out a product that's worth more on its own than as a learning tool, so I agree with you. This signals a shift in Sparkfun overall that I don't like.

iancmceachern 3y ago
Totally. The challenge was Kicad wasn't very usable early on, it's amazing now, but it wasn't really usable for a long while and the only name in town that wasn't thousands of Dollars was eagle. It was also the defacto standard for library and Footprint files, it defined its own little ecosystem. Now we have similar in kicad, but it will take years to amas the level of example boards out there in eagle.