User:Traumflug
Self-employed mechanical engineer from Germany. Real Name: Markus Hitter. Find out more at http://www.jump-ing.com
Contributions
- KlickiBunti (a beginner's guide)
My Take on Non-Commercial Licences
Recently quite a number of people told me about their discomfort with the non-commercial licence I put on each of the newest versions of my hardware designs. So I'll try here to explain why I do this and why I expect this to be a good thing for RepRap as a whole. Yes, as a matter of fact I think using non-commercial licences strengthens RepRap and most, if not all developers should do that.
What's a non-commercial licence ?
First of all, a non-commercial licence doesn't prohibit you to make a copy of a design. Not at all. Make as many copies as you want. I actively support that. In fact, Generation 7 Electronics has a number of instructions and design changes just to make this even easier for you.
Just don't sell these copies. That's all.
Are licences enforceable? Perhaps, perhaps not, I don't really care about that. If people start playing foul by disrespecting the intention of the licence applied and the community welcomes that for one reason or another, I'll quit working on RepRap. That simple.
My view on RepRap
To me, RepRap is first and foremost this Wealth Without Money thing. In this article Adrian Bowyer nicely explains how having replicatable machines makes big parts of the traditional industry obsolete. So, the goal of RepRap, as I see it, is to make machines replicatable. Obviously, this requires very huge amounts of development, as RepRap has reached a first step with the Mendel design at best. We can print plastic parts, but not much more. But to get independent from traditional resources, we also need replicatable electronics, replicatable metal parts, extruders working with naturally existing materials like corn, sand, water, air, whatever our planet has plentiful.
So, for me, development is far more important than getting as many copies out as quickly as possible. Likely, these many, many copies will come into existence without putting any emphasis on this part of RepRap. We need developers, more replicatability, and more developers. The rest will align nicely on it's own.
On what hurts developers
For now, however, we live in this traditional world. A world where money rules, more than anything else.
Quite a number of RepRappers think of RepRap as a project with the goal to put out as many machines as fast as possible. At this comes another artefact of the RepRap project into the game: copy shops. They grab RepRap designs, send them to some manufacturing facility, and sell the result. To these many-machines RepRappers, these copy shops are welcome. More than welcome, they see copy shops as an essential part for RepRap's success.
Maybe they're right. But what is success? See above.
Currently, every few days an new copy shop springs to life, selling this and that for RepRappers. The unfortunate thing about this is: these shop owners rarely do development. They do nothing but copying and selling and make money with that. Lots of money.
Now guess, where this all important money goes. To these shops, or to the developers?
You guessed right. Copy shops make the money, developers do the hard work. Because developers can never ever run a better shop than a person running a shop only. One day has 24 hours only.
This is where a more open licence, like the GPL, starts to hurt. Each hour of development is an hour of lost sales. Accordingly, doing development is unattractive for anything else than filling in leisure time.
Not yet taken into account here are considerations regarding development not only costing time, but also costing real money. For example, if a developer brings a set of electronics through EMF certification, this costs a good share of cash, like in 2'000 Euros or more. The shop-only person won't pay a single one of these Euros, yet receives the benefits of this certification as well.
Last not least in this chapter, even if a design is intended to be replicated, copy shops can alsways go the mass production route. Mass production is always cheaper, so most customers will go there. Yes, injection molds for Mendel parts are said to exist already, so, printers, prepare to compete with € 5.- Mendel kits.
You see? Even if you put less emphasis on development, developers need compensation of some sort or another.
Why do shops not simply compensate ?
They simply don't. Gen7 received a few requests from copy shops wether they can sell a Gen7. The commercial licence offered in return (less than 10 Euros per set) was declined. So far, all of them.
What do open source software developers do ?
Good question! Open source software is said to work, so why not simply apply what they do?
Being prominent. Well, that obviously works out for very few people only. Like Adrian Bowyer, Josef Prusa, perhaps a few others. If everybody would be prominent, nobody would be prominent.
Collaboration. For reasons I still investigate, this doesn't work in the RepRap community. Gen7 started with two persons and as this second person recognized it can't be as prominent with Gen7 as me, it stopped working on Gen7. Gen7 received no other contributions since then. If you look around, RepRappers love starting from scratch, avoiding working together. For whatever reason.
Making money with adjectant work, like installing printers, writing books. Good idea. Works for the non-developer just as fine, so this is not really a compensation.
Get many copies out, so the work is widely accepted. This actually works to some extents. It enforces you to be fast, so you always have more and more recent supply than the copy shops. Having a replicatable design slows things down, so you have to give up on that. Still, this is about the only reason to apply a with-commercial licence.
How do other open hardware projects do ?
Quite a number of them simply don't. One example is Ronja. Such projects reached their zenith when the design started to be reliable and the copy shops kicked in. RepRap is in that position now, but I hope very much RepRap doesn't go downhill from here, but raises even more.
One open source hardware project apparently doing well is Arduino. Arduino doesn't have a non-commercial licence, but a number of similar restrictions, like the name "Arduino" being trademarked. It's also a pure industrial design, so copy shops don't have an advantage when using mass production.
Conclusion
Well, my conclusion.
The benefits of having a design spread as widely as possible are more than outweighted by the drawbacks, by far. If RepRap wants to keep being attractive, developers need some form of compensation. Short of having such a compensation in place, putting a licence with non-commercial clause onto a design is a disappointing step, but the best compromise a developer can do at this point in time.
Also, non-commercial licences have the benefit of encouraging people to do things them selfs. It makes real RepRappers having a benefit over those just shelling out shabby money.
--Traumflug 00:56, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
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