[njoro]

I think Shanzhai in many ways is a better representation of the hacker spirit than open source these days. Many successful open source projects are essentially copies of other software, including things like Linux and Git. It is only these days, when people get paid to work on open source and abandoning things on Github is more the rule than the exception, that copying has become a bad thing.

[cromwellian]

Shanzai doesn't benefit me if I have to reverse engineer competitors. The point of open source is that forking is not a bug, it's a feature. All of the clones of Linux used to make other distributions or products are in fact, the whole point of the enterprise.

Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own.

My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement)

To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.

[njoro]

Open source isn't necessarily a big thing in DIY cultures. They might be cloning something, but they are cloning it for their own process. Even if you could get the design files chances are you couldn't produce it especially not in low numbers. It is more like, say, GNU vs. BSD.

I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.

[justinclift]

> It is more like, say, GNU vs. BSD.

Not really. Both GNU and BSD projects publish their source, so others can pick it up and reuse it with minimal effort.

From this article, it doesn't seem like these hardware people are really doing the hardware equivalent.

> I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.

Agreed.

[njoro]

Maybe it was a bad example. What I mean is that GNU and BSD are implementation of similar things in different ecosystems. The same is often true of tooling and libraries for different programming languages.

I don't think it is really possible describe the difference in a few paragraphs. In open source, as was said, "forking is not a bug". But what is forked is only the source code, not the project. You are still dependent on whoever has the most mind share in that project. Things like Shanzhai is about forking the project and making it on your own terms.

You can argue that open source encourages mindless copying. If you fork a large project you are using their chosen language, build system, code design, project structure, maintenance schedule etc. Yes, you can have your own project, but it is hard to compete in the sense of actually having control. Especially if the project is being run by people who get paid by companies to work and you can't really make money on the activity yourself.

That is my point on the hacker spirit vs. open source. If the homebrew computer club would have been happy with getting schematics to some mainframe and making plug-in cards, history would probably look a lot different. And yes, I think the hacker spirit and open source overlaps. It just isn't necessarily the same thing.

[sushid]

I think the parent is saying that the spirit of open source doesn't mean you eschew safety or best practices, but that's what you see in Shenzhen's extreme capitalism.

There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.