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One thing very much any sensible investor asks is: "How easy someone can steal your lunch?" With an open source product, it's like putting lunch on a table at

One thing very much any sensible investor asks is: "How easy someone can steal your lunch?" With an open source product, it's like putting lunch on a table at a busy high street and leaving it unattended. Nobody is going to risk their money only to find out someone took the product, remixed it and started selling at lower price using their access to e.g. large scale manufacturing and so on. This is especially a huge danger for small business, where they don't have money for lawyers and can't use the economy of scale for their product due to limited funding. Basically, open source hardware is only viable for rich manufacturers who can use it as a PR tool. Some even cynically try to get young and inexperienced engineers to open up their inventions, just so that they can pick the best ideas and use in their own closed source products. In short it's a pipe dream.

avmich 3y ago
You're on an YC forum, so here people will happily tell you about benefits of having somebody taking your product in this case. You can take their improvements and use them in your product too. Here's the case of license abiding, and the whole topic is about it, but in a "good enough case" you may hope for that. That somebody else will expand the product awareness for your product. They'll try to go forward and find a good way, or get some burns trying something market doesn't approve, and many of that you can use for yourself. You may have a profitable strategy by selling to them, by selling your expertise elsewhere, by finding a niche etc. - or even, having enough resources, by going more aggressively to them. This forum traditionally thinks ideas are dime a dozen, and (lots and lots of) IP protections in hardware are weird, looking from the software point of view.
ilyt 3y ago
Most products aren't all that hard to reverse engineer so being open really doesn't hurt you all that much, if it is being popular it will be cloned, open hardware or not. And I think it can work if you are trying to make money on services rather than devices used to provide them. Say you're IoT company, selling open devices that are cloned easily doesn't affect you if you make money on providing best interface for them out there.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  > make money on services rather than devices used to provide them I've come to the same conclusion over time. It's really difficult to make money just selling hardware. But making money customizing hardware or basing a software product/service around readily available hardware is a much simpler business model.
- varispeed 3y ago
  > And I think it can work if you are trying to make money on services rather than devices used to provide them. You sort of proving my point. If you open sourced firmware, apps, any service software, there is no reason why someone else couldn't run it without having to incur R&D and other costs and take your lunch. Hardware is rather easy to clone, that's why many manufacturers don't care to submit their designs to Chinese companies. Often it more or less follows the datasheets. Firmware, however, is a completely different pair of shoes.
bityard 3y ago
> One thing very much any sensible investor asks is: "How easy someone can steal your lunch?" And that's the problem, asking investors for their opinion. Look, I'm a capitalist as much as the next person but you don't start a company based on highly liberal ideals and then expect nothing to change after bringing on outside investors. If you want your non-traditional business model to succeed, don't hand over your vision to someone else. They will demand that you switch your business model to something that feels "safer" to them, and you lose the main thing that differentiates you from your competitors. > With an open source product, it's like putting lunch on a table at a busy high street and leaving it unattended. No, that's not a good analogy. It's like putting lunch on a table at a busy high street and _inviting people to help themselves_. With the hope (not necessarily expectation) of forming a relationship that will benefit everyone in the future. Even that was a little awkward but more concretely, here's an example of Adafruit's business model. They sell hardware, at prices generally higher than what you'd find for the Chinese clones of their products on Amazon and eBay (not to mention AliExp). But what sets them apart from the clones is they write great documentation, tutorials, and articles. They produce educational videos and show-and-tells. They highlight customer projects showing all of the neat things people are doing with their hardware. They pay people to write open-source libraries for a variety of microcontrollers and devices that they sell, so that people can use them easily. They host forums, they are active on social media, they speak at conferences. An open source-business only succeeds when you build a vibrant community around it. If you can't do that, then yes, the Chinese cloners are going to eat your lunch.

avmich 3y ago

You're on an YC forum, so here people will happily tell you about benefits of having somebody taking your product in this case. You can take their improvements and use them in your product too. Here's the case of license abiding, and the whole topic is about it, but in a "good enough case" you may hope for that. That somebody else will expand the product awareness for your product. They'll try to go forward and find a good way, or get some burns trying something market doesn't approve, and many of that you can use for yourself. You may have a profitable strategy by selling to them, by selling your expertise elsewhere, by finding a niche etc. - or even, having enough resources, by going more aggressively to them. This forum traditionally thinks ideas are dime a dozen, and (lots and lots of) IP protections in hardware are weird, looking from the software point of view.

ilyt 3y ago

Most products aren't all that hard to reverse engineer so being open really doesn't hurt you all that much, if it is being popular it will be cloned, open hardware or not. And I think it can work if you are trying to make money on services rather than devices used to provide them. Say you're IoT company, selling open devices that are cloned easily doesn't affect you if you make money on providing best interface for them out there.

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
> make money on services rather than devices used to provide them I've come to the same conclusion over time. It's really difficult to make money just selling hardware. But making money customizing hardware or basing a software product/service around readily available hardware is a much simpler business model.
varispeed 3y ago
> And I think it can work if you are trying to make money on services rather than devices used to provide them. You sort of proving my point. If you open sourced firmware, apps, any service software, there is no reason why someone else couldn't run it without having to incur R&D and other costs and take your lunch. Hardware is rather easy to clone, that's why many manufacturers don't care to submit their designs to Chinese companies. Often it more or less follows the datasheets. Firmware, however, is a completely different pair of shoes.

bityard 3y ago

> One thing very much any sensible investor asks is: "How easy someone can steal your lunch?" And that's the problem, asking investors for their opinion. Look, I'm a capitalist as much as the next person but you don't start a company based on highly liberal ideals and then expect nothing to change after bringing on outside investors. If you want your non-traditional business model to succeed, don't hand over your vision to someone else. They will demand that you switch your business model to something that feels "safer" to them, and you lose the main thing that differentiates you from your competitors. > With an open source product, it's like putting lunch on a table at a busy high street and leaving it unattended. No, that's not a good analogy. It's like putting lunch on a table at a busy high street and _inviting people to help themselves_. With the hope (not necessarily expectation) of forming a relationship that will benefit everyone in the future. Even that was a little awkward but more concretely, here's an example of Adafruit's business model. They sell hardware, at prices generally higher than what you'd find for the Chinese clones of their products on Amazon and eBay (not to mention AliExp). But what sets them apart from the clones is they write great documentation, tutorials, and articles. They produce educational videos and show-and-tells. They highlight customer projects showing all of the neat things people are doing with their hardware. They pay people to write open-source libraries for a variety of microcontrollers and devices that they sell, so that people can use them easily. They host forums, they are active on social media, they speak at conferences. An open source-business only succeeds when you build a vibrant community around it. If you can't do that, then yes, the Chinese cloners are going to eat your lunch.