Speaking as the developer of a fairly widely used open-source hardware
project (https://github.com/PhobGCC) that is not primarily distributed by
me and my team members, if there is any step that is unintuitive or
difficult at all, you need to have intense amounts of documentation for
assembly, configuration, and debug, and people will screw it up.
I've had plenty of blowback from pro users of my project who misattribute
other issues to my boards, and they don't come to me when they have
problems so it's not easy to figure out whether it is my fault or not.
It won't assist competitors if you use a copyleft license, like CERN-OHL-S
v2; if anyone distributes a derivative of your hardware they'll have to
remove your project's name and branding from it (so that they can't pass
off a cheapened version as the original) and they have to distribute the
board files. If someone else has an improvement, then you and your users
can benefit too.
On Fri, Dec 23, 2022 at 5:51 PM Matthew JL <prmattjl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Having explored this myself I think open source projects are always noble,
if unprofitable.
On Fri, Dec 23, 2022 at 5:41 PM Craig Strudwicke <cstrudwicke@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Hi All,
I'm developing some products that are either rocketry oriented or could
be used for rocketry, eg launch control systems, DAQ, flight computers,
Telemetry devices, tracking etc.
There is interest for good reasons for these to be 'open sourced' but
there are significant pros and cons to be considered in this approach.
The main ones I can think of initially are:
Pros -
1. Appealing to the customer, giving them flexibility to add
features/customise and possibly contribute to product
2. Potentially beneficial to original developer - community contribution
and improvement. This may or may not also open up a headache in terms of
communication and support workload...
3. Wider acceptance/bigger customer base
Cons
1. Assist competitors
2. Risk of poor assembly/build by others and the resulting blowback eg
complaints of poor design/bad product by no fault of the original developer
3. Safety issues of badly performing product built by others......
4. Lower revenue for original developer (?)
Very interested in thoughts from others.
Craig
