Open Source Reprap contract

SebastienBailard Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> { .. Lots of stuff ... feeling any better yet now thats off your chest? }

I agree with you. Having a well maintained and used central repository would be an ideal situation. Maybe a new thread would be appropriate though, as I still don't see how GPL makes your life easier -- it in fact makes it harder because now you have the option of spending more time doing the work bringing back material when someone says "No" when it's suggested they use your central repository. At least with the BSDish, if they aren't releasing the source, you don't have to worry about bringing it back and maintaining it. ;-)

The bottom line is, the GPL provides anti-proprietary legal mandates. The BSD does not. I see no reason that maintaining the free stuff under BSD would take any less effort than maintaining the free stuff under GPL. You might argue that at least you have the opportunity to bring the stuff back with GPL, but I counter that you won't -- the proprietary minded companies won't use your code anyway, or at least, they won't tell you that they do -- in which case, if you want to cry foul, everyone gets to donate to the hungry lawyers fund...)

LOL! Do you realise how patronising that sounds?

ummm... any chance we'll see Tommelise up on RepRap.org soon? (Nice stuff like that is what the wiki is for.)

---

At least with the BSDish, if they aren't releasing the source, you don't have to worry about bringing it back and maintaining it. ;-)

With BSD, people can pull an "Apple" and out innovate you without sharing back with the commons. If Adrian had gone BSD, he'd have folk encapsulating his work and not contributing to the commons. I have no real interest in sharing with folk who don't share as well. I've hinted at people who deliberately put their RepRap derivative stuff else where in order to gain personal advantage, and I think another license would make it utterly worse, not better.

---

Um.. what is thread about anyway?

Regarding files of gears that we host, I figure they should be lgpl. What do you guys think?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2010 03:55PM by SebastienBailard.

SebastienBailard Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> If Adrian had gone BSD, he'd have folk
> encapsulating his work and not contributing to the
> commons.
>

LOL! Makerbot and Rapman ring any bells for you? Do you really imagine that either of those two companies are sharing their in-house innovations under GPL in a timely manner, if at all?

All GPL does is make damned sure that you don't allow an ecology of support companies to build up around the core technology because those nascent companies can't protect their innovations.

If you want to wave Linux at me, take a hard look at just how much of the desktop market it's captured, before you try it.

---

-------------------------------------------------------

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

BeagleFury Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> -- the proprietary minded companies
> won't use your code anyway, or at least, they
> won't tell you that they do -- in which case, if
> you want to cry foul, everyone gets to donate to
> the hungry lawyers fund...)
>
Bingo! That's where I get off this trolley to nowhere.

---

-------------------------------------------------------

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Hi Forrest,

... i've made some developments with closed sources or time-limited NDA's (mostly 2 years) and some without any enclosures, so maybe GPL or such

It's not so interesting for me ... i would like to share some of the interesting stuff with others, but it's a big chunk of work to transfer all the pieces of a previous 'closed', but potentially really interesting development to public, if there isn't a community aware of the basics and ressources.

Sometimes i think i'm only in the wrong timeline ... so i'm waiting some ten years, until some other folks came across the same problems and then i'll put my two cents into the pot

So what's with GPL or BSD or any other licenses, when you have thousandfold free infromations and solutions 'laying around' and only need to collect and rearrange them to solve your problem

You need some more guys like Sebastien or other 'librarians' digging in the web and documents and rearrange the information, so they could be found ...

Viktor

SebastienBailard Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> > At least with the BSDish, if they aren't releasing
> > the source, you don't have to worry about bringing
> > it back and maintaining it. ;-)
>
> With BSD, people can pull an "Apple" and out
> innovate you without sharing back with the
> commons. If Adrian had gone BSD, he'd have folk
> encapsulating his work and not contributing to the
> commons. I have no real interest in sharing with
> folk who don't share as well. I've hinted at
> people who deliberately put their RepRap
> derivative stuff else where in order to gain
> personal advantage, and I think another license
> would make it utterly worse, not better.
>

And you find the 'Apple' thing bad exactly .. how? I didn't see any of the BSD stuff disappear when they didn't release their own proprietary modifications; they can't prevent you from taking the BSD unix source and adapting it in other ways that you deem interesting. They can't prevent you from taking their ideas and re-engineering them under a BSD or GPL license (well, unless your device is called a "Franklin Ace".)

And you find the 'Apple' thing bad exactly .. how

It's just that if RepRap shares with folk, than the folk have to share back. And if they're not going to share, that's their problem, they can roll their own.

I've got no compelling interest in making it easier for selfish folk if they intend to do closed-source RepRaps, and in fact, they can't.

This is in essence, the GPL.

Never mind that it would be inane to make a closed-source self-replicating machine.

SebastienBailard Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> And you find the 'Apple' thing bad exactly .. how
>
> It's just that if RepRap shares with folk, than
> the folk have to share back. And if they're not
> going to share, that's their problem, they can
> roll their own.

Yep. That's the philosophical difference; BSD is the "heck, do what you want, this is my humanitarian effort", while GPL is "wtf! You should be as humanitarian as me because I was so generous to you!"

Again, I'm not advocating a change from GPL, because Dr. Boyers priority probably don't match my own precisely (for example, I prefer brown socks with my black shoes, not black socks with my brown shoes.) I'm only pointing out it may reduce the set of participants, slow the adaption of the technology to the world, or reduce the number of contributions (Even 'proprietary' companies have some pressures to share code back to the free world, so long as they feel it won't give others a competitive advantage relating to their proprietary code; indeed, it could very well be that they can then leverage the greater power of the net for fixing bugs in code they choose to share.) It would also get pretty expensive to try and actually enforce the copyright.

And I'm still unclear on how the RepRap community views the output of the files; you say gear files should be GPL. Does that mean if I use those files, tweak them, and then print a billion gears to sell, that I have to provide my source gear files as a condition of me selling that hardware (It is no longer software, mind you)?

It seems no one is stepping up to draw the line as to how far GPL or LGPL can be applied to self reproducing hardware -- the software aspect seems pretty clear, but I'm not talking about software here.

Someone asked what a good example of a problematic fork of a BSD licensed software is. To me it is apple computers, OSX would not have been economically feasible without using someone else's code, they used FreeBSD and quite a lot else, the originally played nice with open source while it was convenient (ironically called "darwin") and now the apple systems are locked up more than ever before... To me that is an example of why I don't like the BSD for things other than commodity implementations of open standards (i.e. ethernet drivers, etc). Certainly software others have every right to chose the license they find most suitable including a "do whatever you want with nothing in return" option. My goals our for open, standardized and unencumbered systems that benefit the public good (not necessarily at the expense of profit making activities either), I think the GPL does a good job of that,

I really don't know much about Adrian and the folks that are the project "leaders", they seem completely absent from these forums and the project in general outside of a couple of youtube posts. As a long time contributor to open source I would say unequivocally without strong leadership the power vacuum is what causes forking.

Case in point, I have my build notes for the mcwire, this seems like really valuable info to a lot of people, I cannot get an answer as to how to officially contribute this to the project consequently in a short time I will get frustrated and create my own blog/site to do so... To be successful as an open source project to you have to leverage the power of community contribution. 4,000 people contribute patches to the linux kernel, Linus (and a handful of others) merges those to produce a single result. That is what reprap needs in my view, a clear concise official channel to perform the merging.

I think the contribution tracking system ala stackoverflow is a critical element to engendering and expanding community and more importantly getting more repraps in more peoples hands. I will attempt to pursue that and would love to be able to do it in a way that was not considered divergent from the "leadership", Feedback appreciated.

goinreverse Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> I really don't know much about Adrian and the
> folks that are the project "leaders", they seem
> completely absent from these forums and the
> project in general outside of a couple of youtube
> posts. As a long time contributor to open source I
> would say unequivocally without strong leadership
> the power vacuum is what causes forking.
>
ROTFLMAO!

---

-------------------------------------------------------

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

I really don't know much about Adrian and the folks that are the project "leaders", they seem completely absent from these forums and the project in general outside of a couple of youtube posts. As a long time contributor to open source I would say unequivocally without strong leadership the power vacuum is what causes forking.

He and the others will come back into the forum soon enough.

In order to get the hardware out there, pcbs, boards, etc. the entrepreneurial sort served a very useful function. Unfortunately, it wasn't really possible to discourage them to not put their stuff elsewhere or run little forklets.

And if you take the long, long view, it all comes back to RepRap.org, because a prospective forker "foobar" will run into cognitive dissonance and moreover open themselves up to user questioning and eventually ridicule and harassment by trying to keep their post-mendel candidate tucked away in their off-site walled garden. (Also, it would be GPL.) Adrian is good at taking the long, long view. He's also good at staying out of these little political tail-chasings.

And, as long as stuff ends up in the GPL commons, it doesn't matter to Adrian where, because he can make use of it, and there's no reason for him to make a fuss or even perceive one because it's all GPL and it's all usable. And he probably thinks it's more useful and more fun to be polite to folk than to make enemies.

In the long run, RepRap succeeds anyway, after all. So the users win!

Mind, I will be slightly annoyed if 10 or 50 years from now, a for-profit is stewarding the archive of stuff like this:
[objects.reprap.org]
but "who's running the library" is a different matter than "who's running RepRap". And that library ain't worth much without a RepRap.

---

I think the contribution tracking system
Case in point, I have my build notes for the mcwire, this seems like really valuable info to a lot of people, I cannot get an answer as to how to officially contribute this to the project consequently in a short time I will get frustrated and create my own blog/site to do so... To be successful as an open source project to you have to leverage the power of community contribution. 4,000 people contribute patches to the linux kernel, Linus (and a handful of others) merges those to produce a single result. That is what reprap needs in my view, a clear concise official channel to perform the merging.

I think the contribution tracking system ala stackoverflow is a critical element to engendering and expanding community and more importantly getting more repraps in more peoples hands. I will attempt to pursue that and would love to be able to do it in a way that was not considered divergent from the "leadership", Feedback appreciated.

Now this is an action item. Something I can do things about.

We've started formally transitioning twiki->mediawiki, and that's being overseen by a good syadmin and a good perl guru. So mcwire will be in the mediawiki within a week, hopefully. At which point you can have a go.

Regarding contribution tracking, that's something we'll keep track of on user homepages. "Ann is a 'project lead' on project x, and is following 'project y, project z', etc. These are Ann's last 5 forum posts{}, and here's what she's currently printing, etc., here's what she uploaded, and here's her blog/post-mendel design sketch. She's favorited these {people, comments, projects, etc.} and these people {} are following her work (and comment on her page)" All of this will be on ann.reprap.org .

We'll make it personalized, rather than doing a crude (and gameable) metric.

I'll take another look at "stackoverflow" and see if we might want to use it as our help system, actually.

It might help we had something like that, but we'd have to think about how it integrates with the bug tracking we're looking at, along with discussion on the forum, and the mediawiki talk pages. We don't necessarily want to throw feature after feature at the website without figuring out how to integrate them.

Fair enough, in terms of a response that is what I was looking for. Please ping me when there is a spot to post my content in a suitable place. Thanks for you hard work rangling these forums.

I think that Adrian and the Prize people sorted out the GPL/BSD prize kerfluffle very nicely. Take a look at the prize page this morning.

"All technology developed by participating teams becomes open source under a GPL
or BSD license. Therefore, the winning team will have to have published at least
some of their innovations more than 12 months before the deadline.

"(Note that the RepRap Project itself is licensed using the GPL, so any entry
derived from that is constrained also to use the GPL. Any entry not derived from
the RepRap Project can use either license.)"

---

-------------------------------------------------------

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

deleted

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2010 05:39PM by spacexula.

---

repraplogphase.blogspot.com

spacexula Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> They rolled over for BfB, hopefully they don't do
> it again.

Huh?

Wow! Talk about dogs in the manger.

---

-------------------------------------------------------

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Quote

They rolled over for BfB, hopefully they don't do it again.

Wow! Talk about dogs in the manger.

I agree with you, Forrest.

Let's pretend, for a moment, that we were the ... Official RepRap Political Committee. We deputize a political officer to go to Adrian to get official permission to rip up BfB's official RepRap card.

Only, that would never happen.

Because Adrian (a) chose to use the GPL and (b) has no interest in alienating BfB from conversation and dialogue which will make it easier to improve the stuff we do welcome and host on RepRap.org.

---

This conversation started on a sour note, and isn't really improving.

Anyone have any positive ideas on how to improve stuff here at RepRap.org? Because I don't think we'll have very much luck attempting to police the behavior of people who already chose not to host their contributions here.

So, let's fix our house, not try to tear down other peoples' structures.

deleted

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2010 05:37PM by spacexula.

---

repraplogphase.blogspot.com

BfB Rapman is mechanically identical to a Ponoko Darwin. Electrically it's derived from RepRap, it OPENLY advertised itself as a RepRap. But none the less they sell it as closed source printer, without sharing their improvements, or to my knowledge sharing revenue with RepRap organization.

We can make a fuss, and they can respond by opening up a link to a link to a spot in svn where they hide their files. And then they're in compliance with the GPL.

I'm not in a mood to make a fuss today.

At least the Makerbot crew actually share their electronics improvments with RepRap.

Yup. And they're really good at motivating and incorporating user submitted improvements. They've even got a Thingiverse to help draw in community, which contributes content, and content, which contributes community.

So, now we have to think about how to get the RepRap.org website to draw in community and content.

[Edit: please feel free to start new threads with your ideas on how to make RepRap a better place, a better website, and a better community. (note: no 'purges', no 'going negative' - that will alienate RepRap user-developers who don't have the time or interest to read rants.)]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2010 06:04PM by SebastienBailard.

---

-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

---

Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

Someone came up with a good idea:

[dev.forums.reprap.org]

Using my 'forum wrangler' powers, I'm going to freeze this thread in amber, and we can go over the good idea.

People are welcome to revisit and restart any topics here in new threads. But this thread is locked to further comment. People who think this is ... inappropriate, can start new threads chewing me out.