[Discuss] OSHW & Economics

Chris Church thisdroneeatspeople at gmail.com
Mon Nov 25 02:02:44 UTC 2013


Open Source Hardware, or Free Hardware, or Freed Hardware - any name by
which you want to call it, is no more separate from market and economic
forces than closed hardware, or any other finite resource.  Its nature of
sharing schematics, designs, or otherwise does not free it from the fact
that someone must put labor or capital in to produce every instance that is
sold to a consumer, variables costs for finite goods may be driven down,
but never to zero.  That someone may choose to disrupt existing players by
undercutting current market price, either by reducing cost of labor
(producing in a cheaper market), reducing margins, through subsidizing, or
by simply dumping on the market at a loss, remains true whether or open or
closed. Moving labor to the cheapest markets may temporarily increase the
availability of a product, but it doesn't increase the amount of Tantalum
mined in the Congo, nor does it reduce the bloodshed involved in doing so,
and it certainly doesn't cause China to sell more rare-earths on the open
market.

What I mean to get at here, is that if we think sharing schematics for
hooking up lots of closed-source blobs will dramatically change how the
whole world works, we're largely fooling ourselves.  We might change the
speed at which new products are developed, but the best OSHW companies will
work with and against the same market forces as closed hardware companies -
they will play the same game with a slightly different strategy for
success, like any closed hardware company.  No, I do not believe that
services are the only answer for the OSHW companies: for many of the
companies of today, there are few viable, profitable services which can
offer enough upside to counter the sunk cost and capital risk, and the
majority of people with large amounts of capital to risk want to see a
reasonable ROI. Why invest it into an OSHW company to make returns lower
than inflation? Admittedly, many OSHW projects don't require much capital,
they can have manufacturing runs in the hundreds, with capital outlays of a
few thousand USD.  They can, with some services and brand-loyalty make a
living wage for a handful of people - but it doesn't scale to the level
required to make the next generation of great technology.  The best in
breed will have to think like the giants of today: they will have to raise
and leverage very large sums of capital to achieve a scale that will be
difficult to disrupt, they will have to convince investors that their
returns will be on-par with or better than their closed-source competitors,
and they will have to look ahead, take risks, and make markets - not just
reduce the cost of what is already out there.  In short, they have to
operate in the world where their schematics are far less valuable than
their organization, and they can operate at scales that enable them to
share far more than just schematics.



On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Matt Maier <blueback09 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Michael Shiloh <
> michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 11/24/2013 01:07 PM, Matt Maier wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Javier Serrano <Javier.Serrano at cern.ch
>>> >wrote:
>>>
>>>  On 20.11.2013 21:48, Matt Maier wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> If someone is "free" to
>>>>> do something, but can't afford to, they don't consider the freedom
>>>>>
>>>> relevant.
>>>>
>>>> Let's agree to disagree on that. I do consider the freedom relevant, and
>>>> I am not the only one.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I finally found this thing where Richard Stallman talked about "free
>>> hardware" specifically. As you can see, his impression of "free as in
>>> speech" hardware is that the freedom isn't relevant since it's so hard to
>>> exercise the freedom.
>>>
>>> http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999062200505NWLF
>>>
>>> "*Because copying hardware is so hard, the question of whether we're
>>>
>>> allowed to do it is not vitally important. I see no social imperative for
>>> free hardware designs like the imperative for free software.*"
>>>
>>
>> But he wrote that in 1999. The reason that OSHW is an issue now is that
>> the cost and difficulty of copying hardware has plummeted, and will
>> continue to do so.
>>
>> I wonder if Richard Stallman feels his statement above needs to be
>> revised.
>>
>> Me too.
>
> This is the only thing I can find that's recent and it implies that his
> perspective hasn't changed in 10 years.
>
>
> http://www.processmakerblog.com/uncategorized/the-processmaker-developers-meet-with-richard-stallman/
>
> "*All in all, the conversation was very interesting for all involved, but
> Stallman was pressed to keep up with his email, so he pulled out his
> famous Lemote Yeeloong
> <http://www.lemote.com/english/yeeloong.html> laptop, a small-screen
> portable whose entire specs and firmware code are available for free
> download on the internet.  The appearance of the legendary device provoked
> a rumination about what this new type of hardware should be termed.
> Reacting to our use of the term “free hardware”, Stallman observed that it
> wasn’t really “free” in the same way as software since only companies with
> access to sophisticated equipment have the ability to create the hardware
> from the specs. Perhaps in 20 years Stallman mused that the average person
> would be able to create hardware from the specs, but at the current time it
> wasn’t in the same category as free software from the point of view of the
> user. Even thought hardware increasingly is developed as software
> with Verilog and otherhardware description languages, Stallman argued that
> that fact didn’t make much difference for the average user of the hardware.
> Therefore, he suggested that we use the term “hardware with published
> specifications”–certainly a mouthful compared to “free hardware” (or the
> taboo term “open hardware <http://www.openhardware.net/>**“), but useful
> for provoking thought about the future of hardware development.*"
> [emphasis added]
>
> Although the Free Software Foundation has certified some hardware as
> "respecting your freedom." So there's that.
> http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom
>
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>
>
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