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by yoshyosh
2233 days ago
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Pretty cool concept you should write more about this. Do you have any other examples of companies that give away their IP but still thrive in the physical or digital world? Will definitely check out Prusa Research. I've always wondered if a restaurant could be built upon a similar concept, teaching people how to recreate it's foods but being so cheap and accessible that the cost of creating it yourself outweighs just buying it. |
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Yes actually Sparkfun Electronics was the first company I noticed that followed this pattern. They are essentially a hardware company that gives most or all of their product's IP away.
I remember this blog post made it very clear that very open source hardware companies could thrive:
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/599
The internal side of their business is was built on open source software, which is a good example of what can come from open source ecosystems:
https://opensource.com/business/12/9/how-sparkfun-built-open...
This post of 15 years of operation shows where their value add is: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/2571
They do a lot of hard work that isn't in their product's IP. Just bringing physical matter together is hard and essentially that's what they get paid for.
The similar company Adafruit I believe does not always open source their products, though they do produce a lot of open guides and open source code. It would be interesting to understand what led them to keep some products partially proprietary (they'd share schematics but not board files sometimes). I wonder if cheap office space in Colorado vs a warehouse in NYC caused the differences.
Also all of the companies that make 3D printers are part of this. The Chinese companies which sell clones are important innovators in the field. Prusa and Creality are perhaps in some ways like Apple and Samsung - they feed off one another. They do not merely clone the prusa - none of the big companies sell an exact clone of the MK3 for example - they instead make the design work for their factory. Prusa relies on lots of 3D printed parts because the best factory for them is a print farm of their machines. But in China they may prefer sheet metal bending and injection molding. Since the design has few restrictions, whichever hardware company that can make a functioning product cheapest will succeed in a normal market. AKA open sourcing has some automatic cost reducing effect.
So if we open source a bunch of technology related to meeting core human needs, then the cost of keeping people alive will go down. Then you need a means of distributing that technology throughout the world. And again open source allows free movement of product around the world - no regional restrictions or limited supply chains. The takeaway for all of us is - the future can be good, go work on some useful open source stuff and lets all keep researching how best to fund it.
So this whole theory is like "OMG we're doing everything backwards" and I definitely want to write about it more. I just find personal engineering projects to draw my attention more than writing. I need a Walden Pond.