This is a very well-written article by someone who is intimately knowledgeable of the history of the field. The interview with Josef Průša is particularly illuminating.
It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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!).
The main problem with the price-fixing demands are that they in practice ammount to "disable almost all foreign competitive advantages". The choice becomes first world infastructure vs third world infastructure for the same rates. It is calling for an incredibly skewed playing field effectively. You wouldn't get Chinese factoty workers with western wages. In practice the despondent third world gets basically nothing in the name of equity, not a good outcome or even a sane one.
> In practice the despondent third world gets basically nothing in the name of equity, not a good outcome or even a sane one.
The objectively fair solution would be for the developed world - particularly the countries that have benefitted from slavery, colonization, theft and other crimes the most - to pay for actual restoration and to meaningfully and sustainably help these countries.
Instead, the status quo is that Western countries exploit cheap labor and lax environmental laws to the detriment of the source countries in the usual rat race to the bottom - say China bans something toxic to the environment, there's always a poorer country willing to let that happen just to get an inflow of hard dollars/euros. On top of that we dump our second-hand clothes or surplus food especially in Africa under the disguise of "aids", which has completely wrecked local industries.
The EU is beginning to do at least something with the supply chain monitoring regulations, but the opposition to them is fierce - it's a pure show of how profitable exploitation (or its ignorance) still is.
> The problem is that first world labor is totally overpriced and their lifestyle is simply unsustainable
If first world labor is living an extravagant lifestyle how much would you suggest dialing it down to? Should it be totally equivalent to the state of Chinese or Indian labor today?
The accusations of unsustainable lifestyle and over valued contributions can easily be hurled in the other direction. From a standpoint of pure self interest this should be concerning - by definition numbers are on labors side.
I am a very libertarian person and I acknowledge that the low prices of my daily living are in part due to the exploitation of others. This is unacceptable morally and I change my spending habits to compensate, despite it not being in my best financial interests.
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.
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.
It can't work if you're willing to engage with bad faith players, and are unwilling to call them out for their bullshit.
China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now.
Punish them for their malfeasance.
The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products.
Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal.
Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate?
That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work.
So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up.
We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.
There's something just morally wrong about wanting to exist in an endgame society that decides its best to give zero credit to creators of ideas.
I refuse that and actually would go to war over it.
Because without that, you just reward war-like tactics in business, thievery, deception, etc, until nobody wants to create ideas anymore, and thinkers are selected out of the gene pool until we're a hive of drones sucking the toes of our queen bee influencers.
> There's something just morally wrong about wanting to exist in an endgame society that decides its best to give zero credit to creators of ideas.
> I refuse that and actually would go to war over it.
It is absolutely morally debased and corrupt to advocate violence to resolve intellectual pursuits. I want to exist in a society that shares ideas since they are not scarce and we can argue over the actually scarce things we care about.
It's morally debased and corrupt to treat deep thinkers like plants that can be harvested, their entire lives and experiences consumed to enjoy the fruits of their intellectual labor.
It's just personal preference, like all politics. We create the world we want to live in. Yes, I once idealized your society, but after years in the corporate world I learned there will always be plenty of snakes out there. I'd prefer not structuring society in a way that rewards them even more.
OpenBSD is exactly my point. It's deeply knowledgeable people giving their hard work away for free. There is nothing sexy about that.
Honorable, idealistic, yeah. I deeply value the people that work on OpenBSD. I wish they had fewer struggles in life. They should start by valuing their time and effort more, like lawyers, who charge 10s of thousands of dollars to read PDFs.
There really has been an influx of low quality comments in the last ~18 months (or perhaps that's just a semi-noob illusion).
Either way, your comment really added nothing at all to the discussion - no counter points, just a poorly considered insult.
So here's the thing - China is a self deluding autocracy that has repeatedly purged competency from its institutions and government (the extent to which this is true far exceeds that of any western nation), I don't need to exert any control in order for that titanic economic system to fail - I just don't.
The entire system is built on lies told to superiors - exaggerated, repackaged and passed on to the next level, all the way up to Xi.
Everything they build depends on stolen technology, but they lack the tacit domain knowledge required to correctly implement what they steal; Cha bu duo simply is not good enough.
Not only can they never compete on merits, they can't even reach a baseline of competency.
That system will fail all by itself, and the more nationalistic they become (and that's a feedback loop) the faster that western support will erode, and the faster the collapse.
just like the US federal reserve, the US federal debt, the US stock market... it's all going to collapse any day now.
give me a break. both the US and china doomsayers are perennially WRONG. they're all fueled by the same stupid handful of youtube channels that spout the same shit over and over and over again.
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).
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.
Prusa's comments here are very important. In this specific case, China is not "stealing intellectual property" in the sense that they are using it without a license; they are literally stealing title to the inventions in question, which is way worse.
Of course, the obvious solution would be to not respect international patent priority from China, but that is tantamount to fighting a trade war, which has significant strategic implications. You can't sue the US to force them to de-normalize trade relations with China for the same reason why you can't sue the US to force the army to nuke China.
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.
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.
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.
This is like 2005 understanding of PRC economics and comprehensive power.
2023 PRC isn't capturing $8 per iphone 3g in assembly anymore. She captured $100 / 25% BOM since iPhoneX. Current trend of PRC+1 reshoring (derisking) is moving low end industries / labour to cheaper labour regions while PRC moves up intermediate goods and value chains. Hence why PRC exports to Mexico increase proportional to Mexico exports to the US. Mexico is finishing PRC intermediate goods to evade tariff. What we have seen is PRC becoming more and more indispensable and integrated throughout the global value chain.
Actual low end semi production is expanding massively in PRC. Medium end (12nm+) expansion is going to be mostly in PRC, because it's capturing market share in worlds biggest semi market that western fabs will increasingly lose due to export controls. What you're seeing is west strategic expansion of fabs that will lead to bloc overcapacity. Most of those fabs will only be viable via state subsidy. This isn't even going into capital goods / machinery that RoW are increasingly dependent on the PRC to try to re/industrialize at all. It's not what PRC makes but how much of everything that she makes that positions PRC to be indispensable trade partner for at least decades.
Repeating the demographic collapse narrative from Zeihan tier analysis is disingenuous. It's a manageable challenge / transition because PRC demographers aren't retarded, this is one area where they actually had a long term plan and are mostly meeting expectations. There's a reason PRC society has ~90% (87 urban / 96 rural) home ownership and some of the highest household savings rate. Old cohorts who saw QoL expand hundreds of times, simply do not have expectation of massive state welfare program, or increasingly being taken care of by kids. The entire dependency ratio / confucius obligation is orientalist projection that overlooks the fact that in aging countries like JP, old people just kind of rot and die unceremoniously. That’s where cultural expectations are currently trending, elderly don’t want to be filial drag on the next gen and are going to die quietly in their house with their nest egg. And what happens when they die? Up to 8 household wealth transfers to a couple who have increased consumption and family planning options. Will some families get fucked, of course, but you know which cohort will see large intergeneration wealth transfer dividend, the educated/skilled ones whose pushing PRC up the value chain.
Meanwhile PRC family planning prevented like 200m-300m excess births, when west is meming about PRC youth unemployment, which at 20% still means 80% of a very large number of skilled workers are being integrated into PRC economy. Much more than US integrates via immigration. It’s very difficult to make 6-8m new jobs for youth, especially high skilled every year. Nevermind double that. See PRC still has 600M farmers + low skilled workers stuck in the informal economy. They’re productivity drags. Reality is avoided adding another 200m-300m mouths that system wasn't scaled to deal with. Current TFR lower than planners want, but right now PRC is where roughly demographers were aiming and planning for.
PRC is also food self-sufficient in caloric terms. Agri imports mostly bulk animal feed and luxury items that don't undermine absolute food security. Not that it matters since she's shifting away from western agri to BR/RU/global south. And really this entire obsession with PRC food imports is dog whistle for PRC food insecurity, in which case, the US has exactly as much food and energy security as PRC because any disruption of PRC energy SLOC is going to be met with disruption of CONUS energy infra. Fortress America is over. PRC can starve US as much as she can starve PRC.
The entire idea that the PRC is unknowable is stupid. Incredible amounts of info on PRC is available via one of the largest western diaspora in the world. The problem is people choose to double down on the dumbest PRC collapse narratives from analysts with piss poor track records or outdated info that’s no longer relevant because US gov literally spending 100s of millions to seed disinfor about PRC while useful idiots wonder why PRC is not collapsing due to XYZ stupid reasons.
> I just can’t see the PRC and the CCP in its current form sticking around long enough.
I took an upper-level course from a China expert in 1989. At the time, a big question was exactly how long China's government could maintain national unity unity in the face of the many contradictory forces pulling at it. Turns out the answer was: longer than a lot of Westerners thought.
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.
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...
> 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:
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.
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.
There's posts elsewhere in the comment thread with concrete reasons. I'll horribly paraphrase them: the demographic collapse is less of a problem than westerners think because China has a high home ownership[0] rate and home-owning adults are way more likely to have children. Old people will just die alone and unloved in China like they do in Japan. China captures enough of the electronics value chain that existing 'derisking policies' practically amount to 'move final assembly to Mexico to evade tariffs.' They're nowhere close to being food dependent.
I'm not entirely convinced by this, of course. But it's important to note that headwinds are not brick walls. And even the inevitable next collapse of the Russian Empire will probably not happen for years, if ever. There are levels of survival that the elites who run sovereign states are willing to accept.
[0] On the timescales of normal family planning, the difference between home ownership and a ninety-nine year lease with no rent payment is immaterial.
It's not really propaganda but a real-world challenge for us. I worked in the American solar industry and in the span of a few years, China went from irrelevant to eating up most of the world's producers and production. Now they are the overwhelming source of most of the world's solar panels and the American and European companies largely folded because we just couldn't compete with their combination of cheap labor, advanced factories, and state sponsorship.
China has its problems and its risks, to be sure, but it would be dangerous to underestimate their hybrid model of quasi-capitalism, quasi-communism. What is freedom limiting at the small scale (why would I innovate when the government owns me) can become absolute beasts at sufficient economies of scale. When they decide something is of national priority, they can top down refocus much of the national productivity (both money and people) towards it and then spin up a multinational logistics chain behind it across Asia and Africa. Then they scale up and dominate. It's happened to many industries already and just saying "China bad" isn't going to stop it.
It's like a game of Factorio played well, except with a billion workers and a lot of money that can be moved around at will. We see similar effects in the West during controlled wartime economies (when production can be directed to a particular cause), or government subsidies and money injections (like during covid, or with the infrastructure bill). It's also how our military is run, for example, and most of our big companies. Top down control economies have certain efficiencies (and inefficiencies) of scale that a bunch of small businesses don't have. But when it comes to commodity manufacturing, it's hard to beat their hybrid approach.
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.
It's not easy to go from catching up to leading... Maybe China can but it seems far more likely that they are destined to settle in a few miles behind the west like the rest of the Asian tigers.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I can say that the FoxAlien kits are pretty okay? But I really needed something 24" x 24", and I will not recommend this one (I think the company that makes it is gone, even).
Nation-state issues are their own thing, and I agree we should be aware of them.
That being said, everyone I've interacted with at/from DJI have been fellow tech-nerds of the highest order, and I mean that as a compliment. I've enjoyed talking to people who are excited about building things.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
"The upstart nation was a den of intellectual piracy. One of its top officials urged his countrymen to steal and copy foreign machinery. Across the ocean, a leading industrial power tried in vain to guard its trade secrets from the brash young rival.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rogue nation was the United States."
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.
The problem is not stealing the design, the problem is stealing the design, getting a patent based on it then suing you.
Even if its obviously a bogus patent the cost and time required to fight it off can kill your company.
> 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.
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.
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.
Totally. The challenge was Kicad wasn't very usable early on, it's amazing now, but it wasn't really usable for a long while and the only name in town that wasn't thousands of Dollars was eagle. It was also the defacto standard for library and Footprint files, it defined its own little ecosystem. Now we have similar in kicad, but it will take years to amas the level of example boards out there in eagle.
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.
> 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?
It's because they're fundamentally different things.
Making and patenting a new, novel, molecule (which is what the entire pharma, materials and chemicals industries basically do at the most basic level) is very different than making a hardware product, which is yet different than making a semiconductor product, which is yet different than a software product, yet different than a genetic product.
The context of this conversation is specifically a hardware product.
Like so many things, it's not about what "should be" but what pragmatically falls out of the chaos of the world. These things aren't master planned by some single person in control. In reality for a hardware product, and any product in general, they say your patent portfolio is only as good as your ability to protect it. That is why these big classic chemical and pharma companies like Dow, 3M, J&J, etc. all have insanely robust patent infringement protection infrastructures in addition to their patent portfolio. In many cases those companies didn't even develop the molecule originally, they bought it. They're basically manufacturing companies with patent enforcement teams.
People like me (I have many hardware patents) don't want to run manufacturing and patent lawyer companies. We want to develop new products and then sell them to the former.
You say why shouldn't someone invent the clapper and then run a company that manufactures only the clapper for their whole career. I say what great inventions did society miss out on because a creative inventor was playing lawyer and manufacturing manager instead.
Ultimately the answer is because different people are good at different things, at different parts of the process. Not recognizing this is to fall victim to "founders syndrome"
AFAIK the "manufacture a new molecule" part, or even the "find a molecule that looks likely to treat a disease" part, is in practice not even the main expense the patent secures; it's the "convince the FDA that the molecule is safe and effective" part, which is less engineering and more procedural/bureaucratic, and it takes the most time and money (after marketing expenses).
The FDA part is indeed expensive, and is a major part of the cost in what I do too (medical devices, hardware), but often these molecules are the result of decades of research. It's not really the case, the FDA part is hard, and takes years, but the molecule part often is even harder and takes even longer, costing even more.
I'm not trying to say the "molecule" part is easy (heck no!) just that the business of drug patents is another kind of ballgame entirely. Also, just about any innovation in any technical field has decades of research behind it, no? (I have worked at a medical devices company as well, but a few steps removed from anything that poked a human.)
The design cycle for hardware products is typically 6 months to 2 years maximum. Moat consumer products get refreshed pr redesigned every year, typically to coincide with CES and other things like the holiday rush. Same with the toy industry, there is a big annual show that you need to release your toy at or you wait to next year. In medical devices it's a bit longer, 2-3 years is common.
If you take much longer than that to bring the product to market you have to start redesigning the stuff you designed first. Components go obsolete, computers and displays change every year, software needs to be patched. It's why programs like the f35 and f22 are such messes, they were designed over a decade.
Most hardware products we interact with daily took less than 3 years to design and bring to market, they are not F22s. Some things take longer like an MRI machine but they typically are done in a iterative way so that proved versions of a product are brought out every year or two.
At your level of resolution, they're different things, but if you zoom out even further, they're the same. A gifted and talented person or persons worked really hard and produced a thing. Whether that's insulin, USB, Bohemian Rhapsody, or the French Laundry is besides the point. Why should one area be treated any differently than the other?
If society really wanted to wring every possible invention out of inventors, we'd lock them in the basement and give them a workshop but instead we let them loose on YouTube so they can try to become Internet famous.
What great works of art are we missing out on because someone needed to work a job for money instead? What great works are we missing out on because someone was successful, made a bunch of money, and didn't have to work again?
You're totally right about specialization and people getting into traps as a founder.
> 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.
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.
100% agree. Open source hardware is a marketing tool that can be highly effective. Adafruit is the master of this type of marketing (Pimoroni are pretty good too). They are selling an ecosystem of parts that enable making nearly anything. The idea of being a maker is everywhere on their site. It’s the difference between going to a wood working shop and a Home Depot - many of the products may be similar or even identical but the goal and the brand are different.
Sparkfun never fit as well in the maker space, and their move towards closed source isn’t surprising in light of their slow decline over the past few years. Their marketing is much more engineer focused, including their product selection.
Adafruit and Pimoroni have the bravery to make new product categories knowing the clones are coming but that they will capture enough of the market to succeed in them anyways. Neopixels are the prime example of this to me.
I love shopping at Adafruit. They make it easy to want to buy from them. It will just work, I know it will just work, and I know they have a library and an example project waiting for me.
I can get the “same” thing on AliExpress often for half or less (depending on the part). But not with the same fit and finish, not with a no solder hookup, and not this week.
And if I do buy it on AliExpress I will use an Adafruit library with it. Open source means everyone using parts they introduced to the maker market is their customer, some just didn’t buy the part from them.
Open source helps their customers reverse engineer their products more than their competitors. Paying someone with actual electrical engineering background to read data sheets closer/better than me is well worth it. I’ll buy their parts, prototype with a few of them, and then make the combined form factor I want with JLCPCB. Adafruit even published many of the tutorials teaching how me to do this! They win by trusting their customer enough to let them go free, knowing they will come back.
I've had the opposite on Adafruit's website. I'm pretty sure I'm still banned from purchasing from them because my credit card at the time didn't have a matching address. They are very aggressive with their anti-fraud.
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.
> 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.
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.
Espressif has also capitalised on this trend with the ESP32, having cheap (~$10) official dev boards available at or before the launch of a new Esp32 model
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
an international organizaion does not pass laws in any country. NGOs such as that one (which I admit did not know existed) influence countries into shifting their laws over a long time
when I stared coming online, national talk about IP laws was just starting out. I don't keep up to date with law reforms, but in the late 90s mainstream awareness was shifting into this mindset of IP law. and back then, the law still spoke of those 3 concepts on their own. I suppose now it's really just one blob of ownership over ideas for the sake of some misguided market-ideology
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
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
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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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™", but this was never the target audience for Arduino.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean to say, at the point where the I2C library user has to seriously think about patching their kernel, the strengths of the RPi as an out-of-the-box embedded computer are pretty much negated. If you have to do actual embedded engineering things, then the RPi becomes just another SoC dev board.
Probably, but if you think about the final 20% of the workload in optimizing, I think it's safe to say one will be immensely more grueling than the other just by the nature of it.
Not to say that your original comment didn't have merit; the beauty of hobby projects is that you can completely skip the last 20%.
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.
> greater hardware expense (because you need a beefier system just to run the OS) and reduced reliability.
Unlikely. The marginal cost is so low that a "beefier" but standard processor that's widely used is likely to be cheaper than a lower-powered but less-popular processor. And using a standard system that everyone else does is more likely to have the bugs ironed out.
I don't like it, but realistically unless you really need low power it's cheaper and simpler to get an extremely standard off-the-shelf RPi like system and slap whatever on it. The savings you can shave off by going smaller just aren't worth the effort.
It entirely depends on the project. For about 2/3rds of the ones that I do, I don't really need much grunt. A 50 cent microcontroller can do the job as well (sometimes better) as a full R-Pi, but at a fraction of the cost ("cost" including power usage, size, etc.). I frequently see projects using a hefty system like an R-Pi that could have been done equally well with a tiny microcontroller.
And having a full OS running means that more code is running. More code means more potential points of failure.
Of course, if your project is something that needs a larger processor or more advanced software, then what you say can be very true.
Also, if your skillset is more in line with programming larger systems than smaller ones, the development time will be shorter for you by going with a full OS.
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.
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.
Fair, but there are ready-to-go Linux configurations for RPi that assume you'll do "normal" things like talk to USB devices and the network.
Additionally, Linux has available a multitude of very rich in-band debugging and logging capabilities that help you understand and mitigate common problems— whereas a bad interrupt or peripheral configuration on some microcontroller could have you banging your head again a GDB frontend or shelling out thousands for a tool like Tracealyzer to tell you what on earth is going on with it.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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”
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I've always seen her point-of-view as pretty balanced. I certainly wouldn't have considered her statements as "rabid" although she is, I think understandably, pro-China.
This isn't the first time she's had issues either. Her openness about her personal situation, her relationship with Kaidi, etc, certainly skirts what's allowed to be spoken about in public.
Hopefully she's able to continue her core work without unbearable compromise.
I've seen some of her conversations on twitter with people criticizing china have gotten extremely aggressive, with her on the pro-china, anti-west side. In her videos it's much more measured.
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 :-).
No. Say you release your project "Foo" as open source (permissive) on project-foo.com. I cannot come and ask you to remove the sources from project-foo.com, and go to everybody who downloaded the code and ask them to delete it.
The version of Foo that you released as open source will always be open source. Now I can make a copy of Foo, use it in my proprietary software Bar, and ship Bar to customers without sharing the sources of Foo (but I need to share the license; all permissive licenses that I know require attribution). Foo is still open source on project-foo.com, I just don't distribute it with Bar.
I can modify Foo, and ship it to customers as a proprietary library (with attribution). My changes to Foo will be proprietary, but project-foo.com will still exist and will still be open source.
Now you own the copyright of Foo, so you can decide to start shipping it (and all new versions) as proprietary. But you can't ask me to delete the fork I made from your open source version, foo-fork.com. So that one will still be open source.
Just like if you publish your code as MIT or BSD. It will still require attribution, and they still can't re-license it to something incompatible with the original license. Turns out that closed-source is compatible with MIT/BSD (still requiring attribution).
And the "closed-source" part will be only the new code added after your contribution, but the project itself will keep the open source license (so that you can fork it at the state it was when the authors decided to go closed-source).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suspect the salient point is that early adopters are more likely to care about openness, both practically and philosophically; but as the bell curve fattens, you include hobbyists-following-tutorials, who only care about specific practical outcomes.
That sounds about right. But wouldn’t the increasingly non-openness affect a hobbyist’s ability to get things done (the practical side as you said, rather than the philosophical side), or does it really not matter in the end for somebody just tinkering?
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)
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.
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.
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!
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."
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
- In parallel, a vertical line of industrial products (managed by a subsidiary called "Arduino Pro") was added that for documented reasons has all the requirements of open source hardware (including full schematics and fully open source software stack) except for the CAD files which are available on request. This level of openness is the same as a Raspberry Pi, if not higher because all components are available on the market. The existence of this additional product line does not imply at all that Arduino reduced its commitment to open source because, as said above, such commitment is even higher than in the past.
Based on these facts, in no way it is reasonable to state that "Arduino is going closed source" or that its business is "opaque". All opinions are legit, but if they don't take facts into account it's just misinformation or marketing...
> 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.
> [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.
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.
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.
I don’t disagree that VCs and VC money is garbage and offered no real value here. The thing I don’t get is that Maker Media took the money at all. I understand believing in your business, but Make: subscriptions weren’t the next social network. There wasn’t that much growth to be had, and I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why Dale Dougherty thought there was.
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.
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, 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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
Without implying that your purchase choices are wrong by any mean, it's worth reminding that the price difference incorporates several hidden costs:
- general higher costs to manufacture in Europe (including labor rights)
- certifications about hazardous substances, radio compliance etc.
- R&D (clones just download the CAD file and load it into the machines with zero costs for product design, development, testing etc.)
- software development of the cores/board support packages (clones benefit from the upstream development with zero cost on their side)
- software development of the tooling (IDE, CLI...) which is a recurring cost as things need to be maintained (clones benefit from the work done by Arduino with zero cost on their side)
- marketing/adv/evangelism/documentation (clones have almost zero cost as they benefit from the long tail of the promotion made by Arduino)
That said, this is legit and Arduino even encourages it by deliberately making the products open source hardware thus releasing the files that any cloner can use and become a competitor at a fraction of the original costs. Buyers can freely choose if they want to support those costs or not, it's up to their ethics, budget and personal choice. But the prices are different because there are different thing inside.
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.
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.
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.
I have had a better experience with the Chinese boards, personally. If you go for the $3-4 ones instead of the $0.50 ones, you will usually get something actually with genuine parts and better quality than a brand-name arduino.
My favorite clone has ESD protection on the pins, and I have never seen it get fried, which I have seen with a few genuine arduinos.
There are clones and clones and some other Chinese-designed boards like Wemos that work just fine. Maybe they're not $2 but you can get them for $5 a piece. I have an D1 mini board with ESP8266 that has been running for at least 2 years with Tasmota and a bunch of sensors, sending samples over MQTT.
If the Western companies stop doing open source hardware, some other companies in China will go on with their own designs. Some have already copied your designs and some others will also make their own and some will copy those as well and also conterfeit other succesful Chinese products. That how it works in China.
The problem with most of these Chinese products is no documentation or useless documentation.
A counterfeit is a product that tries to deceive customers making them believe that it's manufactured by someone else (regardless of the open source nature of its design). Open source hardware design only makes for a part of a commercial product and does not cover manufacturing, supply chain, quality of components, warranty, customer support etc. etc. for which it's important to distinguish who is the actual entity responsible for that product.
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.
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
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.
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.
sounds like you might be referring to this paper published by the st louis fed https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.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
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.
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.
> And I think it can work if you are trying to make money on services rather than devices used to provide them.
You sort of proving my point. If you open sourced firmware, apps, any service software, there is no reason why someone else couldn't run it without having to incur R&D and other costs and take your lunch.
Hardware is rather easy to clone, that's why many manufacturers don't care to submit their designs to Chinese companies. Often it more or less follows the datasheets. Firmware, however, is a completely different pair of shoes.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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).