RepRap and Open Source

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The RepRap movement is based on the idea of free (as in freedom, not as in free beer) or open-source hardware, firmware and software.

Note that historically, the idea and real-life examples of open source hardware existed a few years before the RepRap movement got started, and the idea and real-life examples of free or open-source software existed many years before that of open source hardware.

Erik de Bruijn was one of the early contributors to the RepRap movement and wrote the page Open source hardware in this wiki. There are some interesting links in that page which point to various definitions or points of view on open source hardware.

Also in this wiki there is a Comparison of the Open Source Software Definition and the Open Source Hardware Definition.

Whereas nowadays (2015) the idea of free or open source software is accepted and pretty much well defined, this is not the case with open source hardware, which remains somewhat controversial; and it is somewhat more difficult for different parties to agree upon a common definition. See the Discussion tab for some different points of view on this subject, as they apply to RepRap.

Finally, what follows is the personal manifesto of Adrian Bowyer, the founder of the RepRap movement, on the subject of RepRap and Open Source, as posted on the reprap-dev-policy mailing list in February 2011:


[reprap-dev-policy] RepRap and Open Source
Adrian Bowyer adrian.reprap at googlemail.com Sun Feb 6 08:08:35 PST 2011



My purpose in this post is to say why RepRap is, and always will be, Open Source.

Eccentrically, given that purpose, I shall start with a completely irrelevant fact: I think that Open Source is a good thing. If I ruled the world (which, fortunately for the world and - more importantly - fortunately for me, I don't), all engineering projects from the writing of bank software to the construction of nuclear power stations would be run in an Open Source way. Given my approval of Open Source, you might imagine that that was the reason that I chose it for RepRap.

Not so.

Even if I thought that Open Source was an evil pinko conspiracy to undermine capitalism, to destroy healthy competition, and to usurp the perfect system of intellectual property rights given to humanity for all time by God when he wrote them on stone tablets at Mount Sinai, I would still have made RepRap Open Source.

The good moral and political arguments for Open Source are inconsequential as far as RepRap is concerned, and RepRap is not Open Source because of them.

Remember that RepRap is not about 3D printing. It is about replication. The purpose of the RepRap Project is to make a useful self-replicating machine. We just happen to be using 3D printing to do that, because it is currently the most appropriate technology to achieve our ends. But we could equally imagine a self-replicating laser-cutter. Indeed, many people on the RepRap Project are also working on precisely that.

Ask yourself: which will be the more numerous 3D printer (or laser cutter): one that can self-replicate, or one that has to be made in a conventional factory?

Then ask yourself: which will be the more numerous replicator: one for which all the plans are freely available, or one for which the plans are hidden?

RepRap is Open Source because Darwinian game-theoretic analysis says that Open Source is an evolutionarily-stable strategy for a useful replicating machine that is intended to maximise its numbers in the world. This is a completely amoral fact, and it is the reason that I made RepRap Open Source. RepRap is Open Source because that strategy must out-compete closed-source systems in reproductive fitness.

Some of you may think that I am rather lax in my pursuit of those people who would appropriate RepRap technology and close it off, thereby breaking the terms of the GPL. The reason that I am lax (and I am) is because I don't care about those people. I don't care about them because I know that by closing off the path that they have chosen, they have turned it into a reproductive cul de sac; they have made their machine sterile.

If I am lax, others may be more attentive. This post is in no way intended to instruct, or even to request, others to act or to see things as I do. In particular, RepRap developers retain the copyright in their own developments, and may wish to enforce licencing with more rigour than I. Go to it, I say. I merely started this project; I would be alarmed and upset if I were to find my subsequent actions (or lack of them) taken as a prescriptive model.


---0---

Every RepRap can make RepRaps. Also, every closed-source 3D printer, and every non-replicating 3D printer, can make RepRaps. But RepRap won't make any of them. The exponential mathematics of the RepRap population against the rest follows inexorably. Chasing licence infringers will make almost no difference.

If you are taking part in the RepRap project, then I hope that you believe Open Source to be a morally and politically good thing, as I do. But if you don't believe that, you are still welcome to take part, by me at least. When it comes to the success or failure of RepRap, moral beliefs are almost completely irrelevant.

It is the evolutionary game theory that matters.


Best wishes

Adrian