When Open Becomes Opaque: the Changing Face of Open-Source Hardware Companies (adafruit.com) 62
Long-time Slashdot reader caseih writes: A thoughtful post on the Adafruit Blog chronicles the problems facing open-source hardware companies, and how more and more companies, including Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa, are becoming more and more proprietary. In Arduino's case, they are deliberately trying to stamp out the clones undercutting them. The new Arduino Pro is not open source in any way, and the web site has now removed references to being an open source company.
As always there are subtleties and nuances. In the case of Prusa, not only are Chinese companies taking Prusa designs and source to make proprietary, closed-source products, they are also actively patenting designs and algorithms they've taken from open source.
The original submission ends with a question. "With Red Hat recently taking a step towards becoming a proprietary software company (which happens to use and work on open source projects) and now these reports, what are Slashdotters' thoughts on the future?
"Are truly open source companies doomed to failure, especially when overseas companies do not respect or even understand the principles of open source development?"
As always there are subtleties and nuances. In the case of Prusa, not only are Chinese companies taking Prusa designs and source to make proprietary, closed-source products, they are also actively patenting designs and algorithms they've taken from open source.
The original submission ends with a question. "With Red Hat recently taking a step towards becoming a proprietary software company (which happens to use and work on open source projects) and now these reports, what are Slashdotters' thoughts on the future?
"Are truly open source companies doomed to failure, especially when overseas companies do not respect or even understand the principles of open source development?"
Respect or lack of (Score:1)
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Re: Respect or lack of (Score:4, Insightful)
Unix was proprietary so I am not quite sure what your point is.
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Unix was proprietary so I am not quite sure what your point is.
System V was proprietary, BSD was semi-proprietary, BSD -lite was fully open source. There used to be a number of BSD-based Unixes, including SunOS4. They all went SysV (like SunOS5.) Some, like NeXTStep, were originally based on BSD 4.3, then over time went to being based on 4.4-lite. But because of the BSD license, they didn't have to distribute sources, only retain attribution in the code.
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SysV was the point where people began making several versions of Unix commercially feasible by using the dominant version of SysV to develop their own forks. The.BSD versions became the base of just about every platform since.
BSD is today the basis of a few extremely unpopular *BSD operating systems, and much of MacOS, but very little else. SysV was when most BSD shops stopped using BSD. Linux is far and away the most common Unixlike today, and it is not BSD-based. Most Linux is more similar to System V, though it's not based on that either.
The BSD-based systems could have been more different from one another, but nobody was really bothering.
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"extremely unpopular *BSD operating systems"?
At risk of triggering the infamously tedious "BSD is dead" zombie troll army, the various BSDs are NOT "extremely unpopular" at all. They are in widespread use in embedded systems, enterprise-grade firewalls and other hardware, as well as having a very large Internet presence.
Besides that, the BSDs and their communities have been major contributors to many of the tools and systems vital to modern cyber infrastructure. Look at the list of important software create
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Linux is orders of magnitude more popular than any other Unix[like] around.
BSD had its chance to be the biggest, because it was the only thing going for a while there. But the GPL drew in more users to Linux despite it being decades behind the BSDs at the time.
Re:Respect or lack of (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if your motivation is to create something so everyone can use it, base new developments on it and generally create something "good" for the public.
Some corporate asshole will try to corner the market, monopolize it and bury it under some legal technicalities until you can't even use your own design anymore, nobody else can and they can milk it for profit.
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Solaris might still be alive but I'm going to mark it as zombie status. It turns out the last standing commercial unix variant is AIX from IBM. While not unix like in any way OpenVMS still has a market. It went from VAX to Alpha to Itanium and now finally x64.
Mac OS IS UNIX(tm) (Score:4)
Um, Mac OS? It is literally Unix. You Apple licenses the trademark. Mac OS is the mist successful Unix distribution, and it is still going strong.
There there are about 1 Billion iOS installations. iOS is compiled from teh same source code as Mac OS. I would call iOS Unix even though it doesn't claim to be Unix.
Re:Respect or lack of (Score:4, Informative)
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Respect means nothing in business. Or to put it another way, the only respect they might have is of enforcement. And if the licence allows it then you can be sure it'll happen where there is money to be had.
In other words, enforced copyleft like GPL is the only chance of having something open that lasts.
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Wow! Amazing how "steal" came back in vogue when it happens to US, but when it happens to "the man" then it's not stealing.
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Why do you think "overseas countries"? In case you were unaware the United States is included in that list since it became a first-to-file patent country back in the 2011.
In open source hardware projects there have been numerous cases of commercial entities basically stealing intellectual property from projects so as to file patents for their own benefit. e.g.: UT-Battelle's US Patent 11,230,032 comes to mind, basically stealing all of its concepts from the Hangprinter project and a few others.
It's the logical conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
You have two things going on.
First, most people who want this hardware don't care about whether the hardware is open source. They don't have the means to create it themselves anyway. They buy an Arduino (or more likely, a clone, which leads to part two of the problem) and use it. They don't bother with the PCB schematics or how to manipulate it to fit their needs, they just use what they can buy from the cheapest supplier on Amazon.
Second, China's companies don't give a fuck about open source. They see something, they use it. If it's patented, they don't give a fuck about the patent, if it's not patent, they will have the audacity to patent it and push the original maker even out of his own creation. Happened more than once. You create something, open source it, and since you're an engineer and not a patent lawyer, you don't care about the intricate patent bullshit game. A couple weeks later you get a nasty letter telling you that you can't use your own design anymore because some Chinese knockoff company holds the patent for it and you have no license.
Are you still wondering why they do it?
Re:It's the logical conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, China's companies don't give a fuck about open source. They see something, they use it. If it's patented, they don't give a fuck about the patent, if it's not patent, they will have the audacity to patent it and push the original maker even out of his own creation. Happened more than once. You create something, open source it, and since you're an engineer and not a patent lawyer, you don't care about the intricate patent bullshit game. A couple weeks later you get a nasty letter telling you that you can't use your own design anymore because some Chinese knockoff company holds the patent for it and you have no license.
Are you still wondering why they do it?
More importantly, you don't have the money to fight to invalidate their patent based on prior art. At best, unless you have a rich investor, is to keep selling yours and tell them to fuck off. The bigger problem is teh knock off Is likely undercutting you on price anyway.
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Why would anyone invest in something that they can't monetize in the end? Because let's imagine for a moment you find someone to shoulder the financial burden of fighting the patent. What then? The best scenario is that they wanted to use the design themselves and didn't want to pay a license for it, then you're dealing with someone who has the money to out-produce you and create cheap knockoffs of your product. And you're back at where you were with the Chinese.
Because both of them can easily undercut you.
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Why would anyone invest in something that they can't monetize in the end? Because let's imagine for a moment you find someone to shoulder the financial burden of fighting the patent. What then? The best scenario is that they wanted to use the design themselves and didn't want to pay a license for it, then you're dealing with someone who has the money to out-produce you and create cheap knockoffs of your product. And you're back at where you were with the Chinese.
Because both of them can easily undercut you. Even if you consider the time you invested to design, test and improve the piece of hardware sunk cost and ignore it.
The times when creating something open source and then hope to get signed up by a company that wants to develop it and improve on it are over. Companies will just create cheap knockoffs of your product, crank out a few thousands of them for pennies, then move on to the next thing.
I agree, a patent fight is a no win battle; which is why I say the best thing to do is just to say fucke them and do what you ant. They aren't coming after you either.
Re:It's the logical conclusion (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a cultural thing. Every aspect of Chinese society operates with little regard to law or greater good, and in some cases a ruthless fashion. Consider the practice of ensuring that a person is dead if you hit them with your car:
https://www.news.com.au/travel... [news.com.au].
Not too surprising though, it's behavior that should be expected from citizens living under an extremely aggressive communist country. Totalitarian actually.
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2008 Chinese milk companies added plastic to milk to "increase the Protein" testing. Killed many babies
This was very common here too at the beginning of our industrial era. Not plastic, but formaldehyde. And sand in bread flour and all sorts of other toxic crap. We aren't any better, just 100 years or so ahead.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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There are two tiers to the "communist" society in practice. The communist ideals taught are only about the greater good and the unimportance of the self. That's why there are laws about taking full responsibility for injury you cause as a driver.
The other side is that if you are rich the rules don't usually apply. So killing a pedestrian makes the job easier for your lawyer. And if you have the means you don't care about the greater good. Which is the truth about most communist systems in practice - it
Re:It's the logical conclusion (Score:4, Informative)
You clearly know nothing about Chinese society, because one of the fundamental tenets of it, which is taught to school children and repeated often by the government, is that the greater good must always come first.
Examples of it have been reported on Slashdot over the years, like crackdowns on addictive video games aimed at children, or pollution. It's the justification for the invasive surveillance that is prevalent in China too - those cameras and that firewall protect society as a whole. Most citizens are happy about it too, they are enjoying low crime rates and rapidly improving living standards.
The examples in your article don't demonstrate what you are claiming either. They just demonstrate bad people trying to cover up their crimes, because they know they will be harshly punished for the greater good.
Look at Lenovo. Their laptops are some of the most open in the world. They make complete service manuals available for download, and you can order every single part of replacement. Rival companies don't even have to buy samples to tear apart, Lenovo provides detailed documentation. Just like Western companies, they do what they think is best for their business, not what some fantasy evil scheming CCP politician wants.
You don't have to take my word for this, you can simply take an objective look for yourself.
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The examples in your article don't demonstrate what you are claiming either. They just demonstrate bad people trying to cover up their crimes, because they know they will be harshly punished for the greater good.
You didn't read the article, obviously, or you didn't understand it. The upshot of the article is that people in China know they should murder someone with their car instead of only cripple them, because it will be a lot cheaper.
If you want to disagree with what it said that's OK, but first you have to read it, and then you have to address what it actually says.
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The same thing happens in the west. Remember that China is 1.4 billion people, so take everything that happens in Europe, everything that happens in the US, double it, and you are at China scale.
Idiots trying to cover up their crimes with murder isn't unique to anywhere. China has the death penalty for this kind of thing, justified by it being for the greater good. It's also the reasoning behind the genocide going on there - cultural homogeneity, for the greater good.
Re:It's the logical conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)
You clearly know nothing about Chinese society, because one of the fundamental tenets of it, which is taught to school children and repeated often by the government, is that the greater good must always come first.
Only when "greater good" is somehow being interpreted exclusively as "the good of the communist party". When the greater good clashes with the interests of the CCP, the latter wins out in what everyone is taught to do.
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Can you give an example of that?
The CCP is a bunch of people, with conflicting interests. Because it's the only party, anyone who wants to be a politician has to join it. So it's more like the good of powerful members, and even there the sands shift quickly, with former members now in jail. There are many factions within it.
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You clearly know nothing about Chinese society, because one of the fundamental tenets of it, which is taught to school children and repeated often by the government, is that the greater good must always come first.
Yep. It's called "doublespeak". You speak one thing, but do the complete opposite.
If anything, Chinese people are fiercely competitive as a result. You can see that right in the subway. In most other countries, people on the platform let passengers disembark first, and then enter the train car. Not in China. People rush the moment the doors open, and if you need to exit, you have to actively push against people trying to get in.
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I've used the subway in a few different Chinese cities and never experienced that. It was all very orderly.
In Shanghai they have metal detectors at the entrance to the platforms, but people queue up patiently. Announcements in Chinese and English.
I'm sure you can find some videos of people behaving badly, in a country of 1.4 billion people. Don't mistake those for how things are generally.
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Shanghai is probably one of the more orderly cities. Try something like Chengdu. It has become a bit more orderly recently, but it's still wild. And this happens everywhere, driving is another example.
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The fact that the state news agency is reporting it demonstrates how out of the ordinary it is.
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This is not about the people. What is demonstrated here is a complete failure of the public transport system. There are way way too many people on that platform. Many more than could fit in the train. It is a logistics failure. The people are just acting like people. You see this kind of behavior in all packed groups of people. I'm from the netherlands and there were times that the train system was so broken at rush hours that masses of people were waiting to get on the train with similar behavior evolving
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This is not about the people.
Yes, it is. As an example, Japanese subways can get just as crowded (some stations there famously have attendants pushing people in to close the door), but people there don't rush in trampling passengers trying to get out.
There are way way too many people on that platform. Many more than could fit in the train. It is a logistics failure.
Nope. It will always happen like this in any large dense city during the rush hour. You just can not avoid crowding in chokepoints.
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not even in Canada bro....
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The Chinese patent thing doesn't apply to Arduino clones per se, because Arduino gave away the designs. I suppose they could have counterfeit AVR chips on them, but what they actually have to make them cheaper is inferior USB to serial chips (CH340 instead of the FTDI chip.) This matters a lot for a few projects, and not at all for the rest — especially if you're on Linux, which comes with a working driver for all the CH340 variants.
The thing where there's no effective patent protection in China but t
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The Chinese patenting things happens all over open source hardware, from 3D printers to 3D printed tools. Especially the latter is very prone to it, with various hosters of 3D-Printables where Chinese companies downloaded the designs, patented them and then sent takedown notices to the very hosters they stole the designs from.
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Not open sourcing the design won't stop knock-offs. It doesn't take very long at all to reverse engineer a PCB back into a schematic. I know because I've done it a few times, as a hobby and occasionally for work.
I guarantee that as soon as they publish the basic details of this board, within days there will be cheaper clones available.
That's actually what made Arduino good. Anyone could make a compatible clone, with additional features, or a different form factor. They could port the Arduino system to compl
Re:It's the logical conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)
While generally true, it's the intricate details that are the problem here. I distinctly remember the Cyrix 386, which was a reverse engineered version of the i386, cheaper than the original (by some margin) but only kinda-sorta compatible. While AMD did license the Intel microcode, and thus could use it, Cyrix refused to, paid no license and, for the most part, was compatible.
Unless of course it wasn't. Which eventually meant that it wasn't very useful for things like games where programmers were going for edge cases and working way outside of specs to eke out a bit more performance, which meant that Cyrix was often simply not compatible to those games.
And thus useless to gamers, one of the groups that, back then, drove adaptation of new processor generations because office computers, back then as much as they do now, don't exactly have the need for top of the line processing power. Only today, that would be GPU power, something that wasn't exactly a thing back then.
Now, Arduino isn't Intel, and their boards ain't no 386 or even 486 or Pentium. They are very easily copied, because the MCU at the core is still an Atmel and the board around it is very easily copied. Whether they like it or not. It's not exactly a highly sophisticated integrated circuit. It's a bunch of stuff that is fairly standard as the required periphery of an Atmel MCU. A crystal, some capacitors around it, some limiting resistors for I/O ports, a RS232 or compatible for serial communication, a USB-to-Serial converter to attach it to an USB board and you're done. It's not exactly highly sophisticated. One could even argue that if they lose money over that, they really can't blame anyone because, let's be honest, any hobbyist could have come up with that board design. Copying this is far, far away from reverse engineering a modern CPU.
The thing about Arduino, though, is that it has grown beyond its own use. The Arduino IDE is quite useful. Unfortunately, for Arduino, not just to program Arduinos. The extensible nature of it means that you can just as easily program other MCUs from ESP, Microchip, FM and whatever else you could imagine. Just import the relevant plugin and suddenly you have an IDE for a MCU that is vastly more potent than an Arduino. And quite likely even cheaper.
That's actually Arduino's problem.
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The key difference is that the Cyrix part needed to be binary compatible, where as Arduino clones only need to be source compatible.
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Well, no. They need to be signal-compatible, mostly. The MCU is often enough actually the exact same Atmel chip that Arduino uses. The key compatibility feature is that the I/O ports work identically, which often isn't as much a given as you might think. Especially the ADCs are sometimes quite a bit off due to either being more prone to noise (due to cheaper parts of certain noise-squelching parts simply missing) and some I/Os don't quite have the same tolerances that Arduinos have.
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Naomi Wu did a lot of work to get Prusa to open source its printers, but it just wasn't worth it for them in the end.
Dunno what you're smoking, but it must be good.
Josef Prusa's printers came out of the RepRap Mendel projects and have usually been (mostly) open source. But they, too, are going the way of Ultimaker and slowly becoming closed systems.
Naomi Wu has been trying to work with the Chinese company, Creality, for many years to stop them stealing FOSS projects like MarlinFirmware and reskinning it as their own.
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Basically, if you sue a Chinese company for patent infringement in China, expect a backdated patent just like yours to appear and be cited as prior art, which will be then used to accuse you of patent infringement and push you out. The way it works is that the Chinese company files a patent similar to yours
They are companies selling objects, (Score:3)
not a group of friends working on publicly available designs. There is nothing "open source" about any of this.
Remember when people asked simply for *information* about the raspberry boards? Yeah, a big fat "no".
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They are companies selling objects, not a group of friends working on publicly available designs. There is nothing "open source" about any of this.
Literally all "open source" means is that you can see the source. The first documented commercial "open source" (in so many words) license, for example, was for Caldera OpenDOS — and it really didn't give you any rights to do anything with the source but study it. It has nothing to do with who the contributors are, whatsoever. The BSD license is cited as being one of the earliest popular open source licenses, which is very accurate, and the license as we know it was created for BSD 4.3-lite which was
If only there was a licence... (Score:2)
But I guess that would go against the "freedom" to screw other people over!
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Nice GPL'ed product you have there. I'll take it and sell it for profit.
Huh? I must not do that? Gee, I disagree. You could sue me if you want to. Yeah, you do that. Drag me to court. Get a lawyer. I already have a bunch of them, I'm a corporation after all, we have them by the dozen in some file cabinet, don't ask me where. We'll drag that out for a couple years if you don't mind. Sure, sure, at the end, you can try to sue for your expenses. Good luck for that. And in about 5, or 10 years, or so, you might
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Nice GPL'ed product you have there. I'll take it and sell it for profit.
Huh? I must not do that? Gee, I disagree.
GPL (even 3) does not forbid taking something and selling it for a profit. You lose the argument immediately by falling for that classic bit of FUD.
Also, I don't know if you've worked in a corporate setting before, but even IBM has lawyers advising product teams not to use any GPLd code anywhere, outside of the approved GPL projects that they contribute to. Why would they do that if they weren't afraid of it, or the cost?
Some protection is better than no protection. Even Linus Torvalds appreciates tha
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You can't sell (L)GPL software for a profit without also offering the source etc and in the case of LGPL, a way to update and use the library. So a bunch of games on Android/IOS are using mpg123 and selling their software without even mentioning using mpg123, little well providing source and a way to update libmpg123.
What does a small developer do? Some of these games have large publishers behind them and can tie you up in court for years.
Open Source has always been private profit (Score:3, Interesting)
When I first wanted to get into the world of coding, I used to wonder what kinds of things I could do to get some active working experience in developing software, rather than just toy programming examples and simple personal utilities. I tried to take my degree and look for entry level posts.
I was always told the same thing - I was already supposed to have been contributing to open source projects and have learned this stuff already. I was supposed to bring a portfolio of my existing work with me to these interviews and to be able to explain how these open web stacks worked and what I’d contributed to those projects.
In effect, they were telling me that I hadn’t done my internship yet, and to come back when I had. Needless to say, without months of unpaid time to afford on this, I swiftly changed track and decided to take my lazy girl librarian job instead, using my knowledge as needed to massively outperform expectations without ever really crossing the divide or earning anywhere near what I could be doing. So much for a uni computer science degree opening doors.
Open source project development is an interesting opportunity to contribute and learn about valuable technologies, but it’s quite correct that it is starting to become more regimented, just as the wider culture is shifting away from unpaid labour in general. Private industries exploit open source in multiple ways, but taken as a whole it is a huge industry racket designed to offload the costs of training to be an actual engineer off onto unpaid hours. This is both bad for the industry and unreliable for the end products, and professionalisation is long overdue.
Doesn't matter if it's open or closed (Score:2)
In my experience, it doesn't matter if something it open or closed source. There will always be copycats. What's worse is that there are lots of unscrupulous people/businesses out there who will look at a small company and rather than make the owner a reasonable offer for their IP that would most likely allow that owner to retire in the "well-off" or "wealthy" category (as opposed to the "very wealth" to "extremely wealthy"). Instead, those people/businesses will say "Fuck him, we'll just copy it."
Open s
pandemic supply issues (Score:2)
For these hardware companies in particular, I wonder how much of the current pressure on them is related to pandemic supply chain issues. I know I cannot currently buy things that I was buying before the pandemic, they just are not in stock and anyone that has one wants 8x the normal price. But I seem to be able to find knock-off products just fine, which are also over-priced but not so badly.
If you can't build your own product but somehow China can then you are in trouble. Once the little guys can get a re
Look at where they are selling (Score:4, Informative)
Raspberry Pi and Arduino are no longer "hobby" companies, but sell directly to business partners.
This is coming directly from their blog:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/ne... [raspberrypi.com]
(emphasis added).
See? They don't even hide the fact that business customers come first, and get the lion's share.
We made them popular, allowed them to build an ecosystem, and they are now rewarding us by closing down the devices, and giving breadcrumbs: "Raspberry Pi Pico, with Dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ and 264kilobytes of RAM!)
Best place to sell (Score:1)