User:Traumflug

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Self-employed mechanical engineer from Germany. Real Name: Markus Hitter. Find out more at http://www.jump-ing.com

Contributions

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.

You can also give these copies away, as long as they're free.

Just ask for permission (and prepare for a minor fee) if you want to sell them for money. That's all.

Quite obviously, this neither touches developers (because they always have something non-money to trade), nor does it touch Wealth Without Money (because this wealth has no money), nor does it touch development (because everything is open source and modifications get accepted). The only parties slightly restricted here are those doing sales only.

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. It's 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, in favour of having more freedom, more comfort, in short, a better world. 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, almost 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 point another artefact of the RepRap project joins the game: copy shops. They grab RepRap designs, send them to some manufacturing facility, 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? 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 shop better than a person running a shop only. One day lasts 24 hours only, for everybody.

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 always 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. Seeing others having substantial advantages in the market and seeing others making a lot more money isn't ecouraging to develop even more, it's a clear sign to stop. Altruism is a noble attitude, few people go as far as being happy with making others rich while staying poor for them selfs.

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.

There is no attitude among RepRappers to encourage compensation, much less a mechanism to enforce it. Clearly, this has to change.

What do open source software developers do ?

Good question! Open source software is said to work, so why not simply apply what they do?

As you probably recognized already, the big difference between open source software and open source hardware is, one can request money for just reproducing a design on the hardware variant. Compiling a piece of software is so simple and requires so few resources (a PC, a tiny bit of electricity), almost nobody pays for that. There have been tries to do this for printed parts as well, like giving away a set of printed Mendel parts for free, but this didn't stick. Today's general attitude is to pay some € 5.- to € 10.- for every hour of just reproducing a design, a lot more than the costs for raw material and electricity.

Some developers have a place in the market from 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 the GPL licence. 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, GPL or not GPL. 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. Not long after that, development cheased, the project started to die. RepRap is in that position with shops kicking in now, I hope very much RepRap doesn't go downhill from here, but raises even more.

Then, a lot of people once very enthusiastic in RepRap went away as soon as they were successful. Most prominent example is Makerbot, but there is also BfB, TechZone, Mendel-Parts, German RepRap Foundation and a number of individuals. They once did great things for RepRap, but they go their own, independant ways now. They have their independent machine design, manage their own customer forums, advertise their own products only. This brain drain is the last thing RepRap wants to encourage.

Another group showing up at RepRap simply designs closed source. Examples include RepRap-Fab nozzles, Phillip's carbon heated bed, R2C2 Electronics, GSG Electronics, the OKKA extruder and a lot more. For all these, RepRap apparently isn't the project to contribute to, but the project to generate customers from. I think everybody agrees, closed source is a lot worse than just restricting commercial use of a design.

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. This is the model I try to mimic with a NC licence. Restrict usage where it hurts, be as open as possible.

Conclusion

Yes, about all of the above are words of defense and I apologize for not outlining a glorious vision of success for everybody. This path has yet to form, I'm sure it'll exist one day. In my brain, in everyboy's brain.

Here's my conclusion about the current state of developing for RepRap:

There are benefits of having an all open licence, but the drawbacks weight in a lot more. 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 aren't as bad as they look at the first glance. After all, they have the benefit of encouraging people to do things them selfs. It makes real RepRappers having more choice and (hopefully) better designs than those just plunking down shabby money.

--Traumflug 00:56, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

 

P.S.: all my software works, like Teacup and all my research work is GPL and/or FDL and there is no intention to change that. The above take applies to hardware only.

 

Comments to this take on non-commercial licences

You're welcome to comment the above. Please do this here:

  • So I tried the NC route in my hardware designs. I got a lot of flack from people about it, and their misunderstanding of what the limitations of the NC are. Everyone parroted the "if you have one NC component in your printer, you can't sell anything you make in it." People didn't seem to understand that the limitations were just to limit resellers. It got to the point that no one would buy my boards until I gave in and removed the NC limitations. Of course as soon as I removed the NC part of the license, others took my designs and resold them. They did purchase the first few batches from me, but not the full kits where I had any margin, but insisted on purchasing only the PCBs where I made $1/each. So I made $1 for each board instead of the $20 markup to retail per kit. The retailer made the $20 instead of me as the designer. There needs to be education on what the NC means and what the limitations are and what they are not.

--Ljyang 27 October 2011

Thank you for the comment, Ljyang. I took the freedom to add your user name at the bottom (which can be seen in the history anyways).
This "can't sell anything which is made with something with a NC licence" is often seen in the open source software world as well. Nevertheless, it's totally wrong. If this were true, no machining shop could sell anything, because all the traditional machines are closed source, patent protected and thus under a NC licence. As we all know, machining shop are doing healthy business with their manufactured parts and machine vendors are happy to see this.
--Traumflug 11:50, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
Yes, there needs to be education on what the NC means. I'd prefer to not use it, but at the same time I want/need to recoup some of the money I spend on various prototypes that I build, and some small bit for my time/effort. Board runs cost me ~$30/each minimum for just the PCBs. BOM costs to build up the prototypes can vary. I often end up doing 2-3 prototype runs to shake out designs/bugs. If someone takes those final designs and just sells them and I get little or nothing to recoup my average $100-300 costs incurred during development/design, I lose my desire to share my designs openly. For my new electronics I will have an NC and be firm about it this time. If people want to resell, I will license at reasonable fee or wholesale kits. I don't know what to do about the education of users who maintain the incorrect ideas of NC.
-ljyang 27 October 2011 16:17 (utc)
  • I think it's awesome that you're taking a stand on this NC issue. I'm not sure what the solution is to making expensive projects open source, but to a certain extent I think that the Makerbots and Ultimakers have the right idea. They're still open, but they can profit from their development by fostering a community around their quality work(RepRap is a bit scattered). I really disagree with the Wealth without Money article as decoupling wealth and money generally requires powerful institutions that don't have great track records. I'm not keen on financial advice from people supported by public institutions. Good luck and cheers.

--Chrissketch 10:11, 17 November 2011 (UTC)


  • I'm all for CC kind of licenses. As you have stated encouraging copy-shops getting all the surplus value from all the work the developers have made, is kind of problematic as it recreates the same conditions that apply in commercial applications (from the part of the developers).
Having a 3D printer was a strict, expensive and commercial product. But the parts and the technology was accessible and all those people started the development of this nice open project. In a sense with DIY 3D printers, they de-commercialized the commodity called 3D printer, and showed that it can be made for a ridiculous price (comparing it with ready made 3D printers). So that has created a price/value gap. You could buy a ready made commercial 3D printer for 4000eur or you can make one on your own for 500 or so. And that gap was filled by the copyshops now charging around 1.200 for a ready make assembled one. And thats unfair for all the people that had spend hours and hours for this project, because the surplus value/profit (from 500 to 1200 minus the assembly costs) goes to the copyshops.
By all means I dont want new a bill gates at my front door. No thanks. But CC kind of license is a license that cannot create a new bill gates. It just shares that surplus value between the copyshop and the developer. It is still free for everyone as long as you dont want to make a profit out of it. Because lets be fair. Not all of the people are technically minded nerds. So some people will want to buy a ready made machine and that's ok. But because most of those ready made machines have a surplus value (which means that the parts cost + assembly cost + shipping is < asking price) then is should be fair that this profit be shared between the people selling and the people developing.

--Waste 22:59, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

It sounds like what you're describing on your page is a lot like what QT does. They have a dual license where their code is GPL but if you want to use their code to sell software, you have to pay them for a commercial license. I think mySQL does the same thing. Also, so what if people bitch and moan about an NC license, that's their problem. They're just pissed that their free ride is gone. -BP