[HN Gopher] When open becomes opaque: The changing face of open-...
___________________________________________________________________
When open becomes opaque: The changing face of open-source hardware
companies
Author : Santosh83
Score : 330 points
Date : 2023-07-18 09:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.adafruit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.adafruit.com)
| TravelTechGuy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Personally that's why if I'm going to contribute to open
| source I'm probably going to contribute to GPL/AGPL
| projects. I don't begrudge people who want to license their
| OSS code under something like the MIT or BSD licenses
| though.
|
| I think that software developers are probably the kind of
| people who can know what deal their actually getting if
| anyone can.
| palata wrote:
| Unless you sign a CLA, if you contribute to a project,
| you own the copyright for your contribution. And the
| owner of the repo cannot re-license your contribution
| without you.
|
| So the question is really whether you are fine
| contributing to a copyleft/permissive project.
|
| On my end, as long as I keep my copyright (i.e. I don't
| have to sign a CLA), then that's fine for me. If
| anything, any contribution I make makes it harder for
| them to re-license their project :-).
| remram wrote:
| They can't re-license to any incompatible license. If the
| original was permissive, that leaves many options.
| reaperman wrote:
| _Getting GPLv2 Compliance From A Chinese Company- In
| Person!_ [0]
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ
|
| Edit: NSFW (but still compliant with YouTube obscenity
| standards)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'm at work. Let me guess, this is on Naomi's channel :-)
| reaperman wrote:
| Of course! Didn't realize it would prove so controversial
| here on HN. Figured most everyone would already be
| familiar with her shtick, especially in context of
| discussion on open source hardware. But I should remind
| myself these wouldn't be eternally relevant controversies
| if it were possible to reach a consensus.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be hearing much more
| from her. Last week on twitter she mentioned that she'd
| been told that basically she's making the government look
| bad (being too honest about some problems) and to stop
| posting. Haven't seen anything from her since.
| reaperman wrote:
| While she does have some criticisms of the PRC, she's
| also pretty rabidly pro-China, especially since COVID.
| I'm surprised they cracked down on her, she's been a very
| staunch defender of China's honor online and often her
| followers jump on the bandwagon against any anti-China
| person she argues with.
| remram wrote:
| > If you give me your recipe for chocolate cake, and I
| make a few changes to make it suit my tastes better, I
| have to give those changes to you and the community.
|
| This is completely false. You can bake your cake with
| your secret recipe and eat it too.
|
| If you give someone else your improved cake though, you
| have to give them the matching recipe.
| traverseda wrote:
| The above is NSFW
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| On what grounds? The crop top? The denim shorts? The
| enhanced boobs?
|
| Man, this discrimination is just disgusting.
| mcdonje wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| LGPL then
| iancmceachern wrote:
| 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.
| petsfed wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| > 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?
| cracrecry wrote:
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| 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.
| varispeed wrote:
| I don't think patents should exist at all. They are basically
| designed for the rich to enjoy regulatory capture.
|
| Patents don't take into account things like you can "invent"
| something naturally by exploring given idea. I have few times
| developed something and then through more research learned it
| has been patented, so I had to find a different way of doing
| the same thing and wasting time. Even if I invented something
| first I wouldn't have means to patent it.
|
| Now we have a situation where things like VC funds are forcing
| companies to patent anything they can as a prerequisite for
| receiving money - in case the idea won't get executed
| correctly, they could chase any other company that comes up
| with the same idea, for money.
|
| and yeah, you invented something, but for any reason you didn't
| or couldn't patent it and then some toff's engineer figures the
| same idea? They get the patent and you have to abandon it.
|
| The whole patent thing should be scrapped is not fit for
| purpose.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| 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]
| andyinfrance wrote:
| 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
| technothrasher wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| pydry wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that hallowed time when intellectually property
| "worked" before everything went bad is a myth.
|
| There are plenty of countries that didnt enforce it for a time
| though and experienced a kind of mini renaissance.
|
| I dont think it was ever really intended to "protect" the
| rights of inventors nor was it ever good at doing so.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| I've heard that (at least in some places) patent started as a
| a trade barrier, to protect domestic industries from foreign
| competition. The penniless inventor was just a fable to sell
| the idea.
| bsder wrote:
| > There are plenty of countries that didnt enforce it for a
| time though and experienced a kind of mini renaissance.
|
| See: America, England, and the Industrial Revolution
| fragmede wrote:
| The story of Hollywood as well.
| tedivm wrote:
| 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.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| 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.
| e28eta wrote:
| 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
| snvzz wrote:
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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-regar...
| jacoblambda wrote:
| 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.
| Palomides wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sircastor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Printrbot ran out of money. Couldn't compete with cheap
| Chinese printers.
|
| The one thing about this whole conversation that is
| frustrating to me is how people blame these companies for
| not being cheaper than China, essentially. "Why aren't
| you better than Bambu?? Why is business taking so long??"
| Like, this business is freaking hard. Hardware tech is
| nearly impossible to succeed in as a small company with
| low cost, consumer machines! Now competing with China,
| who got to free ride on accomplishments from OSHW
| companies and community, is just something they're not
| doing for fun or whatever??
|
| These folks are in a nearly impossible situation. China
| has nearly every advantage. It's a miracle that any of
| them have stayed in business at all!
|
| So while I do think it sucks they've pulled back on open
| source, it's completely understandable. These companies
| are barely surviving as it is. It drives me nuts how
| people take this all for granted.
|
| That said, Limor Fried is such a _bawse_. All hail Lady
| Ada!
| Fomite wrote:
| I mean, we also watched Lulzbot self-immolate on the
| alter of open source.
|
| When it comes down to it, "Open Source" doesn't carry
| much of a price premium for a lot of people. "You can
| print the parts yourself" doesn't carry a price premium
| for a lot of people.
|
| I think Prusa enjoyed the "It Just Works" and being the
| logical upper-level consumer printer recommendation, and
| a little bit conflated that with the ethos of the
| company. Which worked for a long time.
|
| But I think he'd be better off pushing fair labor
| practices and superior support as the main things, rather
| than grousing about open source.
| Fomite wrote:
| I'm a little bit in a similar place. I reviewed a LulzBot
| SideKick recently, and my major takeaway was "This is a
| kickass printer from three years ago, but I'm worried
| about it as a new entry to the market."
|
| And there's a very good chance my lab will be replacing
| its current printer with a Mk4.
|
| But I think the key is I _don 't_ feel that same
| excitement about building a kit. The open source nature
| of the thing really doesn't matter to me beyond "That's
| nice". And _that 's_ why I bought my Mk3. Because it was
| a no-muss, no-fuss printer that I ordered assembled from
| the factory, put on my desk, and got to work with.
|
| The problem is that space is now a little more crowded,
| and it's hard to compete on a feature-by-feature
| comparison, especially at the price point. Some of that
| is stuff Chinese firms are getting away with, and some of
| it is genuinely that there's such a thing as economies of
| scale. But I also think Prusa has a lot of goodwill - I
| can't imagine another company releasing the Mk4 with a
| major advertised feature (input shaping) missing, and the
| plan for it being a one-size-fits-all approach and not
| getting _eviscerated_ for it, rather than most people
| going "I'm pretty sure they'll work it out."
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think part of this is the difference between buying a
| 3D printer when you've got work to do for it and buying a
| 3D printer out of interest in additive fabrication
| methods and what you could do with them. If those are
| answered questions then you don't need the 'tinkering'
| stage, you need the stuff that the printer makes much
| more than you need new insights (or, probably even more
| than you need the printer itself, its just a tool on the
| way to getting that stuff).
|
| I bought a Prusa kit, had it sit around for a bit,
| finally put it together with one of my kids and since
| then we keep finding really good uses for it that I would
| never have thought of before I had the thing. The idea
| that you can fabricate small scale plastic components in
| a tiny corner of your desk has been a game changer in
| many ways. Just the other day a part on my car broke,
| which the manufacturer wants an absolutely outrageous
| amount of money for (it's a part of the door mechanism).
| An hour later or so I had a near perfect replacement in
| my hands (10 minutes to design it, 50 minutes to print).
| Fomite wrote:
| Me, having fixed something via 3d printing, to my wife:
| "Is this why people with woodshops are always so smug?"
|
| But yeah, my interest in 3d printers is "I need an X" -
| either a bespoke, custom plastic part that is made in
| small batches for a research project, or for my home
| printer, wargaming terrain, and I really don't care about
| modifying the printer, etc. That's also what's been
| standing in the way of me building a VORON - I
| just...don't want to.
| soulblaze3 wrote:
| [flagged]
| AugustoCAS wrote:
| [dead]
| unintendedcons wrote:
| Chinese practices poisoning the well for everybody, again?
| mcdonje wrote:
| 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.
| undersuit wrote:
| Why did we make a well with a button on it that says "don't
| press; releases poison"?
| jimmyk2 wrote:
| The button spits out 1/10 of 1C/ every time it is pressed.
|
| The man pressing the button has his own reservoir of clean
| water.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yeah. After Arduino proved that there was a market for low-
| feature dev kits, TI made their MSP430-based Arduino
| competitor that they sold for $4.30 and manufactured in
| volume, just like the Arduino.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| I watched Limor give a talk--gosh it must be at least a decade
| ago--about why she and Adafruit do open source hardware. She of
| course went through all the usual reasons but one thing that
| stuck with me is when someone asked, "doesn't making your
| hardware open source make it easier for companies to clone your
| stuff?"
|
| Limor's response was: not really!
|
| You see, the Chinese are literally the world experts at
| reverse-engineering electronics. It is nothing for them to take
| literally any piece of electronic kit on adafruit.com, crack it
| open, list out a BOM, scan and trace out the circuit board, and
| have a prototype ready before lunch time. If they decide to
| clone your widget, making it closed source isn't even going to
| slow them down.
|
| YES, they will make money off your design. And you have to be
| okay with that. Because what they can't (or at least don't) do
| is build a thriving and supportive community (and ideally,
| repeat customers) around themselves.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Very weird take on MIT/BSD. They cannot be closed. You can
| always fork.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| Maybe this shows the value of packaging? What Arduino offered
| wasn't just a bunch of commodity chips, but a guided
| educational experience. The same way that Lego Mindstorms is
| more approachable than a tub of plastic powder and some copper
| wire, having someone do the design, sourcing, integration,
| testing, documentation, etc. is worth a lot.
|
| I wouldn't even know where to start with a pile of
| undifferentiated chips. Arduino lets you spend a bit of money
| (relatively cheap when it comes to hobbies) to learn the ropes
| from vetted and curated parts that are made to work together,
| including the software.
|
| At some point, yes, maybe you know enough to be able to
| evaluate the Chinese knockoffs on your own and avoid pitfalls
| and counterfeits, and find the correct vendors who offer an
| awesome product at a good price. But it takes a while to get
| there. I can hardly find reliable power stations and USB PD
| chargers these days. I wouldn't even know how to start to
| evaluate an entire dev kit.
|
| If anything it seems like this is the fate of intellectual
| property in the age of global capitalism. Whatever we design,
| whether it's software or chips or fighter jets or solar panels
| or cars will be copied and produced much more cheaply there
| because their costs of everything is much lower. And actually,
| relative to most of the world population, it's probably the USA
| that is overpriced. We have our insane quality of life to keep
| up with.
|
| But that's hardly the fault of any one company. As we move more
| and more into services, domestic manufacturing just can't keep
| pace. All those reshoring efforts don't really seem to be
| making an impact. Most things I see are still Chinese,
| especially at the price points I can afford.
|
| I don't know that "killing the openness" is the inevitable
| result. Closed designs get stolen and copied too. Getting
| bought out and eaten alive by Chinese companies the same way
| Hollywood and video gaming have been going seems the more
| likely route?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Whatever we design, whether it's software or chips or
| fighter jets or solar panels or cars will be copied and
| produced much more cheaply there because their costs of
| everything is much lower.
|
| The Arduino _was_ a copy itself, and no credit was ever given
| to the original grad student who came up with it and did
| almost all of the work to make it into the system that was
| released.
| Chilko wrote:
| > no credit was ever given to the original grad studen
|
| Not enough credit perhaps, but this is untrue as Arduino
| does credit Wiring, the grad student's project. Probably
| worth noting that one of his thesis supervisors was one of
| the founders of Arduino.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| They did a relatively mediocre job, in a space with zero
| competition.
|
| That means it's a money grab? How is it their fault no one
| competed in this space?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Well, when you say you are an "open-source" "nonprofit," both
| which were their initial pitch, yes. If not, go for it.
|
| Pivoting from a nonprofit to a for-profit should be illegal.
| Looking at you, OpenAI.
| neoeldex wrote:
| I remember the days having to build my devkits with power
| regulators and having to flash them with separate programmers.
| The Arduino ecosystem opened up hardware to many designers,
| makers and tinkerer's. sure thing, the real cost of the boards
| is low. but the value is tremendous.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I disagree. There are numerous advantages to using
| microcontrollers and one of them is not having a full
| operating system.
|
| A full OS brings a whole lot of software complexity and
| places greater demands on the processor, which means
| greater power draw, greater hardware expense (because you
| need a beefier system just to run the OS) and reduced
| reliability.
|
| There is certainly a role for systems like a R-Pi that have
| a complete OS on them, but there is also a real place for
| lighter systems.
| petsfed wrote:
| Eh, if you're doing _anything_ in the background on an RPi,
| timing intensive operations like I2C or SPI get really
| buggy. Years ago, I had to add a retry function to basic,
| 3-byte I2C transactions on an RPi, because even something
| as simple as that was still getting bumped pretty often.
| These days, I 'm more likely to just use a microcontroller
| for all of those operations, and then use an FTDI cable to
| let the micocontroller report its results up to the RPi.
| That's always been easier than setting up something like
| DMA on an RPi.
|
| Granted, I write microcontroller firmware for a living
| these days, but I still use RPis and Arduinos for proof-of-
| concept work because of the simplicity of the toolchains.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I thought Linux had better support for realtime workloads
| these days? I mean, yes, I would still prefer a dedicated
| micro, but if you need a Real Computer in the mix it
| might be _possible_ to get better results out of it.
| petsfed wrote:
| I mean, yes and no. But it also gets into "who is it
| for?" and while you _can_ do things better, eventually
| you reach a point where its easier to just do it the
| right way.
| numpad0 wrote:
| IMO, Linux is unusually complicated to configure for
| unattended use cases, despite being a server OS. Arduino
| just goes into user code shortly after powerup, a la
| AUTOEXEC.BAT, no systemd-jumpscared shenanigans. There's
| just too much of those.
| Animats wrote:
| There ought to be something in between Wiring and Linux.
| The problem is that the good minimal real-time operating
| systems are not free. QNX, VXworks, etc. are all
| expensive.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| ESP32-based boards come with FreeRTOS built in.
| fest wrote:
| Zephyr fits the description IMO.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| That sounds like a good usecase for micropython. In any
| event, I disagree; microcontrollers are _easier_ to use
| than having to admin an entire GNU /Linux box just to
| twiddle some pins.
| sircastor wrote:
| I think you're underrating what Arduino was in its time. They
| weren't selling an undifferentiated dev kit. The defining
| feature of the Arduino was that it:
|
| * Plugged into USB (The Decimila, Duelmilnova, and the Uno)
|
| * Had a software stack that worked on Mac, Windows, and Linux
|
| * Had a software library that allowed people to drop in
| features to accomplish goals.
|
| Arduino was a bad fit for an electrical engineer making a
| product, but it was an _amazing_ fit for hobbyists and artists
| trying make a one-off project or presentation. This is the
| thing that the EE evangelists and gatekeepers could never seem
| to grok: No one* cares if it 's taking 4 cycles or 120 cycles
| to blink the LED, or turn the servo. Sure it starts to matter
| if you're doing a dozen other things simultaneously, but most
| people just wanted the LED to blink.
|
| Arduino was a miracle when it showed up. No toolchain to figure
| out because it was all just in the package. No bitmask
| decoding. No being rejected because you're not running Windows.
| The C Superset was surprisingly readable code for people who
| didn't have a programming background.
|
| It is shameful the way that Arduino was pulled out of Wiring,
| without real credit and acknowledgement.
|
| *Yes, there's the subset of people who were chasing efficiency,
| or who were interested in doing things "The right way(tm)", but
| this was never the target audience for Arduino.
| jkestner wrote:
| Living long enough to be seen as the villain. As you point
| out, Arduino did a lot of original work in integrating the
| toolchain that made it really simple to make something. They
| then stagnated and competing products shot past them (and
| that artist market).
|
| The team was a group of academics who weren't necessarily
| ready to build a business, but instead of letting it go when
| the market, they've made some desperate decisions. The
| industrial/commercial markets that a lot of people here use
| microcontroller boards for are well catered by much cheaper
| boards, and Arduino should've stuck to developing their
| original creative market with better tools.
| ilyt wrote:
| > The team was a group of academics who weren't necessarily
| ready to build a business, but instead of letting it go
| when the market, they've made some desperate decisions. The
| industrial/commercial markets that a lot of people here use
| microcontroller boards for are well catered by much cheaper
| boards, and Arduino should've stuck to developing their
| original creative market with better tools.
|
| _and do what?_ That market isn 't used to pay for the
| tools (hell, they made "good enough" one that's free), and
| their boards are too pricy even for some one-offs
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Pivot to actually being an open-source-supporting
| nonprofit?
|
| You know, the thing they were saying that they were?
| ilyt wrote:
| Right but earning money how ? nonprofit still needs to
| pay the bills.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| From donations like a normal nonprofit. They probably
| won't be able to pay the 7-figure salaries they were used
| to from the grift they had before, though.
| varispeed wrote:
| > unable to compete with Chinese companies that charge a fair
| price
|
| That's debatable. I don't think China has the same labour laws
| or costs of running a business. Maybe it's fair from their
| perspective, but we really should have tariffs on such products
| so that they would cost as much as if manufactured in the west
| and perhaps use that money to help domestic businesses grow.
| ilyt wrote:
| I can buy the chips and pay myself living wage and still
| solder Arduino nano for cheaper than they sell it and I don't
| live in 3rd world country. That's the amount of profit they
| make on one.
|
| It's not the case of just chinese labour being cheaper, they
| earn massive profits on one and when you can have 5 or even
| 10 boards made for cost of one arduino it just becomes silly.
| varispeed wrote:
| There is a substantial difference between making something
| for yourself and make it to sell as a business.
|
| Also take into account that someone with a skill is not
| going to look at making a living wage. It's a poor return
| of investment in one's education.
| ilyt wrote:
| Congratulations on missing the point entirely
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You can pay European/American labor rates and make an
| Arduino for <$5. It takes Chinese labor rates to make
| them for <$1.
|
| They sell for $30.
| paulkrush wrote:
| 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.
| pierat wrote:
| > 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-...]
|
| > [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.
| varispeed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bityard wrote:
| > 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.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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?
| pierat wrote:
| Lets be fair.
|
| This is where I buy arduino stuff.
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004305055818.html
|
| And yes, the price is $.57 and $1.29 shipping. Its a total of
| $12.98 for 10 of 'em. And that includes USB cables and
| headers. And, they're also individually sealed.
|
| And on https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-
| nano?selectedS... , they're only $24.90 EACH. That's $249 not
| including shipping for the same.
|
| Or perhaps you need an Arduino Mega for 3d printing? Only
| $12.88 here. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32909503032.html
|
| You want ESP32 with usb-c ? $34.35/quantity 10 .
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005565990528.html
|
| Or perhaps STM32 is more up your alley with arm?
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32792513237.html and that
| includes the ST-Link hardware programmer and the board for
| $3.53
|
| And, as long as you ask the dealer for the manual on Ali,
| they'll almost always provide that. Might be partially or all
| in Chinese. But again, us DIY makers can afford this. We
| can't afford the jokes of prices in the US or European
| markets.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I'm talking institutions buying class sets, colleges having
| your intro to microcontroller classes have you buy an
| arduino at the book store. Starter kits on amazon, etc.
|
| Of course you could buy something from aliexpress for
| pennies on the dollar and a month of shipping time, but a
| lot of people don't.
| joemi wrote:
| I've had a really bad time over the years with the USB
| chips in the clones, to the point where if I'm using a
| clone these days, I won't even attempt to use its USB and
| I'll just use ICSP to program the arduino clone. For cases
| where I know I'm going to want to use the USB I'll happily
| buy a genuine Arduino.
| mianos wrote:
| I have as well with MacOS. Never with a PC. I have some
| TTGO-display boards that have some USB to serial chip I
| could never get working on a Mac, no matter what drivers,
| uninstalling, installing etc. They worked fine on a PC.
| In the end I threw them out so they did not get mixed up.
| A very frustrating experience.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Really? I've had no problems with the (usually CH34x) USB
| interfaces across high double digits of boards. I could
| ICSP them (and do for some of the 3D printers), but I
| can't recall a single instance of Chinese-made clones
| needing that.
|
| There's no way it would get me to pay 5-8x over the
| clones/respins.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| To be fair lots of other people just buy arduino brand
| boards directly or through Amazon, sparkfun, adafruit, etc.
| tacon wrote:
| >This is where I buy arduino stuff.
| >https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004305055818.html
|
| >And yes, the price is $.57 and $1.29 shipping. Its a total
| of $12.98 for 10 of 'em. And that includes USB cables and
| headers. And, they're also individually sealed.
|
| Yes, I've bought Arduino's from AliExpress. But that link
| is for a $0.57 "micro usb 30cm", i.e. a cable. The actual
| boards start at $6.36. Isn't shopping on AliExpress fun?
| ilyt wrote:
| you can get them at $3-4 bucks
| ilyt wrote:
| ...so how VC funding help solve that problem ?
| chaxor wrote:
| They can increase the price further due to pressure.
| Problem solved.
| flangola7 wrote:
| And now will VC solve this problem? You can't stop china
| counterfeiting by throwing money at it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I stopped buying those cheap boards, because of
| quality/counterfeit issues. It's worth paying more (to me)
| to avoid those problems.
|
| Even when they work, there are often longevity issues,
| which make them unsuitable for projects that I am giving to
| others or that I expect to be using for years to come.
|
| But if I'm doing some experimental project where I want a
| lot of boards, or where there's a high risk that I'll fry
| them, the cheapies make sense.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I may be an anecdote of 1, but I have purchased dozens
| (probably over 100 by now) of arduino clones of various
| types and have position converters based on Nano clones
| running large machine tools in various industrial
| locations. In all that time I've had _one_ failure and
| that was due to me doing something stupid.
|
| I think I've only ever had one genuine Arduino brand
| device and that was sent to me by a client.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Excellent!
|
| My experience is a bit different, obviously, but I'm
| happy that yours is better.
|
| I'm not talking about clones in general, though, I'm
| talking about cut-rate boards from China and such.
| Dah00n wrote:
| How can open hardware be counterfeit?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Counterfeit chips, not boards.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Greed.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| robomartin wrote:
| Patents are not the problem.
|
| Bullshit patents that should have never been granted are.
| That's the problem.
|
| I have no choice but to live in the world of patents. We
| have to file patents and protect ourselves from them. One
| of the reasons for which we have to endure such bullshit
| is the massive numbers of patents that should have been
| rejected and never issued.
|
| The US Patent Office has granted so many patents that
| are, as they say in the trade, obvious to those skilled
| in the art, that almost every domain is an absolute
| minefield littered with these bullshit patents.
|
| What do you do if you have to play in these domains?
| Well, go and file bullshit patents! It's an arms race.
| And the ammunition takes the form of PDF files approved
| by the USPTO.
|
| Defending against a claim of patent infringement is very
| expensive, even if the patent should have never been
| granted.
|
| In some ways, the bottom line is that you have attorneys
| doing what they do best: Make a mess out of something
| that could have been far simpler. You have attorneys at
| the USPTO working with attorneys being hired to put
| patents through. Everybody is happy.
|
| And, if litigation happens, they are all even happier,
| because that's when the big bucks roll in.
|
| I am all for true-invention patents, worthy patents.
| These require investment, time, effort and true discovery
| of new things. I am just fine rewarding companies and
| individuals with 20 years of protection for such work.
| Anyone who has developed difficult technology understands
| that it could easily take ten to twenty years to see
| results. My problem is with the 75% to 95% of patents
| that should have never been granted.
| jiminymcmoogley wrote:
| sounds like you might be referring to this paper
| published by the st louis fed https://s3.amazonaws.com/re
| al.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-03... - i'll be honest and
| admit i haven't read through it but i do see it mentioned
| on here a lot so it's been sitting in my bookmarks
| untouched for a while, just thought i'd link it for
| anyone curious
| paulmd wrote:
| definitely that's the one, thanks
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Removing all IP protections would likely make it harder
| to run these sorts of businesses, but nobody has any
| inherent right to run a successful business
| ilyt wrote:
| 3-5 years protection would be enough to give head start
| without stifling innovation much I think
| sircastor wrote:
| I'm reminded that Maker Media was making a Magazine and a
| faire, and then took a pile of VC money and crashed and burned.
| It was a mess. The Magazine is back, the faire is back but the
| whole debacle is a lesson learned that none of that was
| necessary.
| pierat wrote:
| No, get it right.
|
| The VC destroyed the Maker Faire and magazine because it did
| not make enough profit fast enough. Therefore it was more
| profitable for the VC to destroy the business and cash in the
| chunks left over.
|
| Venture capitalists are shit no matter how you look at it.
| And they will take sustainable businesses and dismantle them
| wholesale to squeeze a few extra pennies.
|
| I hope Make/Maker Faire will never again touch a cent of VC's
| money.
| jeron wrote:
| >And they will take sustainable businesses and dismantle
| them wholesale to squeeze a few extra pennies.
|
| wait till you hear about private equity
| reaperman wrote:
| There's a LOT of overlap there. VC is one form of private
| equity. And increasingly, VC's are willing to execute
| some of the more traditional private equity strategies
| which you're likely attempting to reference.
| villgax wrote:
| Likewise in software with Facebook AI releases
| reaperman wrote:
| This is a very well-written article by someone who is intimately
| knowledgeable of the history of the field. The interview with
| Josef Prusa 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).
| josephcsible wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It's happened but only on highly strategically important
| stuff like microprocessors
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| gchadwick wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| per prusa's comments in the article, they are filing patents
| based on open source work at scale
| eropple wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Bambu has been saber rattling. Ironically, I think it's less
| aimed at Prusa and more at their own Chinese knock-off
| competitors.
| inconceivable wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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...
| leidenfrost wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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...
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| In other words, _intellectual property_ does not work. That
| era ended a while ago, and the west is still playing pretend.
| disintegore wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| oytis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| inconceivable wrote:
| lmao china took over japan
|
| OKAY BUDDY.
|
| you are literally just making shit up.
|
| you're going to upset both the china ccp tankies and the
| japanophile weebs at the same time. truly a remarkable
| feat. something i didn't think was possible.
| cyberax wrote:
| > 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 ).
| Who were then simply assimilated.
|
| Second, China has never conquered Japan.
|
| Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
| disintegore wrote:
| Probably the least belligerent superpower in history,
| internally and externally.
|
| They're no saints. Anybody can see that. But by my
| estimation 90% of the discourse around China in the west
| is just pure consent manufacturing.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| 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.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Which is IMO fine for PRC since it's manufacturing base can
| always out compete west on cost. The real issue is IP law
| protects incumbents, predominantly western companies. Stats
| from a few years ago was PRC was paying $6 in IP to US for
| every $1 it took. It's a rigged game with rules made by
| west to benefit west. It's unsustainable. As PRC catches
| up, would it like a world where their IP gets respected?
| Yes, but the second best is a world where western IP gets
| increasingly ignored because that deals disproportionate
| damage to those with most profitable IP portfolios.
| [deleted]
| samtho wrote:
| 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.
| dirtyid wrote:
| 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.
| samtho wrote:
| PRC global trade is propped up by extremely low-value,
| often non-essential goods on the export side and they
| import much of very essential food supplies and some
| other raw materials to make these goods. We have already
| seen a shift in manufacturing to Mexico which benefits
| the US with a skilled labor force enjoying low CoL, all
| within the North American free trade zone.
|
| Low-end semiconductor manufacturing is one of the last
| essential things the world imports from China, but much
| of this is already moving to Vietnam. Medium to high-end
| semiconductor manufacturing largely takes place in Japan,
| Taiwan, and the United States - all of which are allied
| together and will respect export restrictions. We will
| see Germany (another ally) step in once their fabrication
| facilities are complete and operational, maybe by 2026.
|
| Calling their wide-scale demographic collapse as merely
| "challenges" is disingenuous. This is a looming complete
| and total catastrophe that will spark a humanitarian
| crisis, the likes of which the world has not seen before.
| Their short-sighted one child policy they had into place
| from 1979 to 2015 has robbed them of more than half of
| their 30-40 year olds, people at their prime working age,
| just as their parents are entering retirement. The legal
| obligation of children to take care of their parents in
| their old age had put additional burden on the single
| child of each parental union. These adult children are
| putting off having a family of their own due to this.
| This cycle continues.
|
| And this is just the stuff we know about. We likely won't
| even know how many people died of COVID-19, what are the
| figures of major events that we don't even know about?
| Disinformation campaigns stamp out people speaking ill
| China, but when all this comes to a head, it will seem
| sudden but will the crescendo of compounding events,
| falling onto the next like dominos.
| solardev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| It's not even the same system though. When some Chinese
| company gets big enough, they just get partially or wholly
| subsumed by the government in a quasi-nationalization. IP
| and patents don't have much meaning in such a system. They
| aren't even much protected from themselves, much less from
| foreign pirates.
|
| They're not quite communist but they don't protect
| individual property rights to the same degree that we do.
| If we stole their designs they'd probably just shrug, but
| we'd still have to contend with our own laws and domestic
| competitors and international trade agreements with other
| Western nations, while they just continue on their merry
| way, growing and growing while securing logistics and
| supply routes from a bunch of small countries and mines.
|
| At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently
| organize national production around some shared goal. Ours
| allows more independent experimentation and a faster pace
| of innovation. But once they have their minds set on
| something, collectively, I don't think our market would be
| able to keep pace unless we keep being able to
| technologically leapfrog them. But that can only last for
| so long, especially as our education continues to weaken...
| msla wrote:
| > At the end of the day, their system can more
| efficiently organize national production around some
| shared goal.
|
| That sounds like propaganda. Oligopolies are historically
| hilariously inefficient, and China's brain drain hardly
| seems like it portends well for them:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-
| threatens-it...
|
| https://archive.ph/ACMyG
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nyt
| ime...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-
| millio...
| dirtyid wrote:
| PRC state driven industrial policies are hilariously
| efficient against entrenched (western) incumbants,
| because the alternative is to not be competitive at all
| since new competitors simply can't compete against moat
| of established western companies with resources that
| rival government funding, no less US cheap money. PRC
| scale is large enough to do that, meanwhile most
| countries/blocs too small or uncoordinated to even try.
|
| That's why US/west copying PRC industrial policies,
| because PRC industrial policy is initially "inefficient",
| and then they become absurdly efficient, saturating
| domestic market at first, then export massive surplus to
| globe, and eats away at western shares. Analysis of PRC
| moving up value chain and global export share on PV,
| telecom, android smartphone, display panel shows
| reduction in operating margin of leading companies by
| 50-90%. Hence US is trying to stop PRC semi. And I'm
| guessing west on PRC EV soon. Because the efficiency of
| PRC indy policy is also measured in making western
| companies less productive.
|
| As for PRC brain drain, Chinese academics/talent in west
| floating back to PRC in record numbers. Those are good
| portends vs statistically insignificant % of millionaires
| trying to hide their money abroad. Which entire ignores
| the fact that PRC generates so much domestic talent now
| that west can't meaningfuly braindrain even if they
| wanted to. PRC is in process of milking the greatest high
| skill demographic divident in recorded history. It took
| PRC 20 years to build up ~15M STEM talent to catch up in
| west in most sectors except extremely difficult
| integration projects like aviation and semi. She's
| generating that much talent every 3-4 years now.
|
| E: over post limit
|
| Yet the west copies PRC, an "unserious" regime, none the
| less. From PRC content moderation, to surveillance, to
| industrial policies, there's more convergence than
| divergence. Because PRC is prescient. Enough so to be
| labelled as only US competitor who is capable of
| reshaping global order.
| msla wrote:
| The PRC bet on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and got
| burned. Their constant whining about Taiwan and childish
| insistence that Tienanmen Square never happened makes
| them the laughingstock of the world. Their continued
| support for the demented lapdog regime in North Korea is
| similarly laughable. Their deification of gangsters like
| Mao and Deng puts them on a par with other unserious
| regimes as North Korea and the former USSR.
|
| China's massive digital divide is shameful, as is its
| neglect and brutalization of ethnic minorities. China's
| sexism is notorious the world over, as is its noxious
| pollution and the utter disregard its companies have for
| environmental laws. There's little for the West to copy,
| and even less the West should copy.
| inconceivable wrote:
| i can tell you watch a lot of youtube videos on why china
| is bad.
| macintux wrote:
| I'm not necessarily disagreeing but "you're wrong" is
| much less compelling than "here are some concrete ways in
| which your list is misleading".
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hardware can be copyrighted, but it only protects the PCB
| layout.
| eropple wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| eropple wrote:
| Bambu Studio is open-source and available on GitHub. Prusa
| complains that it's hard to upstream, yes--but when you
| look at Prusa's GPL'd firmware for their printers, _that 's
| even harder to upstream_. They don't even try to upstream
| to Marlin! But they don't complain about that. At least
| Creality, of all people, _sponsors_ Marlin development--
| like, with money.
|
| So what, exactly, is your point here? Bambu is compliant
| and is reciprocating; OrcaSlicer derives from Bambu Studio
| and works great. Their printer firmware is _not_ as far as
| anyone can prove derived from GPL software (and I tend to
| think that by now somebody would 've found it), so they
| keep that.
|
| Let's get to the brassest of tacks: one can talk about
| "contributing" until one's blue (or orange) in the face,
| but Prusa can't or won't ship a functioning, assembled-
| before-you-get-it multimaterial CoreXY for less than
| $2,500. Bambu came out the gate with one, _not_ reliant on
| Marlin or Klipper, and it _actually works_.
|
| I genuinely can't believe I'm having to point this out,
| because I think Bambu _does_ suck as a company and sniffing
| about patents well-and-truly sucks, but they remain, and
| are the only, such bastard-coated bastards that can
| actually ship something usable at a price somebody can
| afford. $2500 for a Prusa XL would be more expensive than
| my CNC. I actually _do_ need multimaterial, not for models
| but for tooling, so continuing to limp along with my
| collection of Klipper printers isn 't reasonable. So what's
| your actual solution for a quality-outcomes tool at a
| reasonable price?
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| What CNC do you recommend for <$2500?
| Fomite wrote:
| They may not be reciprocating in the way Prusa wants, but
| they're open source enough that there's also a fork of
| Bambu's slicer.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Just wanted to add on- I've gotten more actual, paid print
| work done in the few weeks I've had an X1c than the previous
| few months with my old SeeMeCNC delta. It makes no sense to
| use anything else around this point- the generational
| difference between the machines is that great.
| eropple wrote:
| I disagree on one point: the Bambu extruder's TPU
| performance isn't great. It's usable, but I'm keeping my
| Neptune 3 Plus around specifically because its extruder and
| hotend do an excellent job on flexibles.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Sure, I get it. I'm keeping my delta around for taller
| prints, too. But they are edge cases for my daily work.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's also worth noting that bambu are run by people who used
| to work at Dji, a company that made spy drones for several
| governments.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What is the threat model here? That they monitor what
| people are 3d printing? I mean, not exactly scary imo...
| eropple wrote:
| FWIW I don't feel comfortable using their cloud stuff
| either, and I'm buying one. They do, however, have a SD
| card and a LAN-only option.
| teraflop wrote:
| 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.)
| disintegore wrote:
| 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.
| tmchu wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Point of clarification: could they file suit or have they
| started doing that?
|
| In other words, is this a fear of something that might
| happen or something that is currently ongoing?
|
| Or, to put it another way, is the simply rationalization
| for decision to close source made for other reasons or an
| actual reason?
| tmchu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not sure your analogy makes sense for
| the bambu printers vs prusa situatuon. If anything, prusa
| did not spend enough money actually advancing their tech.
| They are still deeply attached to their good old bed
| slinger design in 2023, and they literally just
| implemented the same thing with minor tweaks for years
| until recently. They rested on their laurels which was
| fine when the 3d printing industry was stagnating, but
| not anymore.
|
| Bambu lab on the other hand came up with something pretty
| good, very well integrated that has basically taken 0
| from the prusa designs. So it's not really closed source
| profiting off of public or open source work. Maybe for
| the slicer, but that's it.
|
| Just compare the abysmal performance and quality of
| prusa's MMU that still really sucks almost half a decade
| after they originally released the product. Even if they
| are super expensive too! While on the bambu printers...
| It just works.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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 =)
| gchadwick wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| [dead]
| kiba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
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