[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.