Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

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The push from Adafruit at least seemed rather bizarre and cynical to me. All of a sudden, they started caring about the open-source status of hardware that predated the Arduino split and using it as justification for why Musto was evil and needed to go. This wasn't something they'd cared about before. Indeed, when Bre Pettis and Makerbot went against their loudly-proclaimed principles and took their 3D printers (which borrowed heavily from other's open designs) closed source while hiding behind vague statements, Adafruit's response was to post a piece that compared the people who criticised Makerbot to "fundamentalists" who "blow things up" and claimed to be defending "open source innovation and polite disagreement" by doing so: https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-sour...

Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.

I find your post to be cynical.

The article you attribute to Adafruit is not written by them, they just linked to it from their blog, ostensibly as food for thought and discussion.

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to interact with Limor and PT over email after they reached out to me in response to a project I'd posted on a forum. I found them to be gracious, supportive, and genuine, and based on the conversations we had I find your claim that they don't care about open-source hardware to be dubious.

There was no discussion. They systematically deleted comments that disagreed or that (correctly) interpreted Makerbot's comments as them going closed source. I personally had one deleted for pointing out that the "fundamentalists" were far politer and less damaging than Bre Pettis's own public shaming of newcomers to the open hardware community who merely had trouble understanding the proper format they should release their hardware files in, and that politely holding someone to their own standards isn't really fundamentalism. Suggestions from others that comparing opponents to terrorists is not in fact contributing to polite disagreement got similarly short shrift.

@makomk the only reason we'd delete a comment is if you cursed, made personal attacks, etc.

we covered makerbot going closed-source on adafruit, including the class action lawsuit. https://blog.adafruit.com/?main_page=blog&s=makerbot additionally, we covered the close-sourcing of the arduino.org products (federico's arduino) - https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23freearduino

and just to be super-duper clear, my opinion is that it was a mistake for makerbot to go closed source the way they did.

> Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.

There's a lot of this. People think there's huge sums of money to be made in open source hardware because of Arduino and Raspberry Pi. It's such a broken misconception (not just because most of Arduino and almost all of Raspberry Pi is closed source) it's almost laughable.

The people doing ok out of open hardware are people like Great Scott Gadgets, Simon Monk, RC2014, Digistump etc. None of these guys are warming their fires with spare $100 bills, but they're all doing amazing open source work and are making enough to eek out a living.

Open source hardware has all the money-making benefits of shooting yourself in the foot from the get go just like with Open source software, but with orders of magnitude higher startup costs. Sure, there can be successes, but those that are tend to be rarely fully open.

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