by Santosh83 on 7/18/23, 9:59 AM with 263 comments
by reaperman on 7/19/23, 3:55 PM
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).
by iancmceachern on 7/19/23, 6:15 PM
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.
by HeyLaughingBoy on 7/19/23, 5:00 PM
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.
by bayindirh on 7/19/23, 7:13 PM
Eagle, Spark Fun, Arduino, Prusa, Red Hat, SourceGraph, VSCode Plugins (was it OmniSharp), etc, etc...
MIT & BSD licenses are used as a weapon against GPL more and more...
Rust's "Rewrite In Rust" movement is used to replace GPL tools with MIT versions which can be closed on a whim...
"{VSCode,Chrom}ium" projects give the illusion open source while being effectively used to harvest community effort, too.
I don't think we're on a good track.
Disturbing times.
by h2odragon on 7/19/23, 3:57 PM
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.
by buildbot on 7/19/23, 4:15 PM
by pclmulqdq on 7/19/23, 5:00 PM
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.
by tedivm on 7/19/23, 6:16 PM
by Joel_Mckay on 7/19/23, 9:20 PM
China IP address show up within weeks of starting any new small open project, and 2 months later one often sees project cloned alpha PCBs available on Ali-express/ebay/Amazon/tindie/sparkfun. The defective legacy RAMPs 1.4 with potential fire risks are still being sold a decade later.
It has become such an issue, that even finding the original authors to support their projects becomes increasingly difficult as google starts to overflow with pages of SEO ad links.
I wouldn't say anything has changed, but open hardware doesn't seem sustainable unless you are an active small factory in China.
Good luck =)
by gchadwick on 7/19/23, 5:08 PM
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).
by TravelTechGuy on 7/19/23, 4:54 PM
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.
by mcdonje on 7/19/23, 4:39 PM
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.
by sircastor on 7/19/23, 7:10 PM
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.
by dmvdoug on 7/19/23, 8:20 PM
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.
by RobotToaster on 7/19/23, 5:31 PM
by unintendedcons on 7/19/23, 4:45 PM
by snvzz on 7/19/23, 8:22 PM
If I was ever interested in these companies, it was because I prefer OSH. Should they stop doing OSH, I'll simply look elsewhere.
by e28eta on 7/19/23, 6:49 PM
by paulkrush on 7/19/23, 4:21 PM
by alranel on 7/21/23, 8:49 AM
- In the last years, the Arduino team has been releasing MORE open source stuff than it had been doing in the past. This is documented transparently in the yearly open source reports: https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-sou... https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/01/20/the-2022-arduino-open-sou... Even recently, the flagship Arduino product (UNO) was renewed and with no surprise it's still completely open source.
- In parallel, a vertical line of industrial products (managed by a subsidiary called "Arduino Pro") was added that for documented reasons has all the requirements of open source hardware (including full schematics and fully open source software stack) except for the CAD files which are available on request. This level of openness is the same as a Raspberry Pi, if not higher because all components are available on the market. The existence of this additional product line does not imply at all that Arduino reduced its commitment to open source because, as said above, such commitment is even higher than in the past.
Based on these facts, in no way it is reasonable to state that "Arduino is going closed source" or that its business is "opaque". All opinions are legit, but if they don't take facts into account it's just misinformation or marketing...
by kapitanjakc on 7/19/23, 5:14 PM
- How does an Open source hardware company make profit?
- If they do want to make profit by going closed source, what is the issue in that ?
- Does it matter if they go closed source? People still figure a way out to tinker with most stuff.
by villgax on 7/19/23, 6:11 PM
by pierat on 7/19/23, 4:50 PM
> [quote from the link] “So today, we dial up our vision for universal innovation with a clear strategy to expand our portfolio for professionals, supported by a Series B funding round of $32 million led by the global deep tech investor Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), joined by Renesas, Anzu Partners, and Arm.”
Remember folks, "VC's rhyme with feces". They will enshittify your business faster than every toilet being used during the Super Bowl.
Arduino is the latest casualty.
by jtode on 7/20/23, 1:12 AM