An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The original TechShop in Silicon Valley was kind of like that. People were making rocket components for the X-Prize. But over time, it turned into a factory for Etsy junk. The concept of "hand made" items made on a CNC laser cutter was a bit much, but it kept about eight laser cutters busy at the San Francisco TechShop. Then Etsy dropped the requirement that you had to make it yourself, and allowed outsourcing. The successor to the bankrupt TechShop has most of the same laser cutters, but they're mostly idle or broken.
People made Burning Man stuff, repaired bicycles, and made furniture. OK hobbies, but not going to change the world or even create a manufacturable product.
I don't know of a single maker space in Silicon Valley with decent electronics prototyping tools. Ardunio hacking, yes. Surface mount soldering and pick and place, no. The commercial maker space in San Jose and San Franciso has cast-off CRT oscilloscopes. About half the right stuff is there, half-broken and gathering dust. I'm waiting to see if the new nonprofits starting up can get their act together and actually open.
What's left of "maker spaces" has turned into "STEM" programs that parents push their kids through so they can improve their resume for college.
Maker spaces may not have become a thing, but that's okay as long as the makers are still out there. In the U.S. at least, the true maker space is still in your basement or garage.
> That doesn't scale.
It most definitely can scale. If there is a strong national or regional social norm that encourages tinkering in your current garage, basement, or dorm room, it can reach a far broader scale than forcing folks to make things in pre-defined maker spaces that require memberships and monthly fees.
Maker spaces have benefits, like increased connectivity and collaboration as well as efficiently dividing the cost of larger pieces of equipment. However, they also introduce costs, like monthly fees, forced social connections, and engendering group-think. It can be far more beneficial for a group of students/colleagues/friends to meet in their parent's basement or garage than to each sign up for a maker space.
Even professional electrical engineering shops rarely build their own stuff anymore - specialized assembly houses do the work.
This is the flip side of efficiency achieved through specialization - most pro hardware "STEM" jobs consist of manipulating computer files in various formats and passing the buck to some stranger to do the actual construction. Unfortunately, this leaves a pretty big monetary gap between "circuit stuff as a hobby" and "I want to make a serious product using the best technologies available"
It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings.
Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal manufacture of software.
Then again, it really begs the question, why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Or let's say you buy into sales and profit and economics and mom-and-pop artisanal crafts and whatever as being in and of themselves valuable. It's not happening in Shenzhen with respect to software.
The answer is not as simple as localization. Bunnie is having a particularly reductive IP conversation, where there's no law and it's just whatever unwritten cultural norms you personally favor rule the land and can be enforced violently. The IP conversation must be bigger than that, because we live in a world where all the major tech companies, not just Chinese ones, are copying each other's features. And yet, nobody's calling that a lawless Shenzhen world. It's not really about copying or original inventions or any of what he's talking about!
So lemme ask you this: would you rather subscribe to an IP policy in the service of an idiosyncratic electronics hardware community? Or would you rather subscribe to whatever IP theory lets you write good software?
I'd choose the later. That theory is "Whatever the license says," and the diversity of licenses and their social impact speaks for themselves. For that to work, you have to respect the rule of law. Which isn't saying much!
More importantly, lawyers are innovative too. That legal work around OSS licenses has had a much bigger, much more positive impact on the quality of software than a fuck-the-IP-law attitude going on in Shenzhen.
I do, and you should too. For example, I evaluated mobile-focused neural net inference software and ncnn from Tencent came on top: https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn
I hear Ruby is pretty popular.
Because the approach that Shenzhen uses for hardware is rarely the same approach that they use with software, and their software approach is generally not something to be emulated.
We may get a lot of wacky gizmos out of China, but the vast majority of them run unmodified or craptastically modified Android/Linux/vendor BSP.
The software model that's closest to what Bunnie describes in Shenzhen is the plain old open-source model. To get good quality software, you need to put significant time and resources into these open-source projects, and let people modify or fork them as they see fit.
Really, the goals are just different. The goal of the Shenzhen model is diversity - "there are so many products out there, what should I make that's a little bit different?" The goal of most software is arguably quality and reliability. There's no shortage of software with silly features, and it's usually easy to add a silly feature to an open-source project if you really want something specific. This is often the kind of software modification I associate with the Shenzhen model.
What's difficult is forking a project over an architectural disagreement and then fixing it, because you have to understand a lot more about how the software works before you can do that, and whatever documentation exists is likely to be in English.
My point is, that model only exists if you respect the rule of law and specifically conventional copyright. So the thing we can point to as a successful (in some conventional sense, as opposed to idiosyncratically "pro-artisanal" Bunnie Huang sense) demo of his theory exists because of, not in spite of Western IP law!
> that model only exists if you respect the rule of law and specifically conventional copyright
because these licenses are basically blank checks to do with the software whatever you want? They don't really depend on the existence of any IP laws.
And afaik MIT, BSD and Apache just add the duty of mentioning the author, which has no practical implications on the usage of the software. At least I wouldn't care if someone actually writes my name somewhere. If someone asked me to relicense software I wrote as CC0 (and it was formerly MIT) I'd happily do so.
That means that the open source movement doesn't depend on IP laws. Some projects might still depend on it, like the linux kernel (because of GPL) but bitcoin for example doesn't (MIT). Both strategies work in practice.
ADDENDUM: What I want to say is: for many projects IP laws don't have any positive effects, they just add friction by requiring the author to add (and think about) a license.
GP's point is that 3-clause BSD-licensed software makes such a modest requirement upon licensees that it's functionally equivalent to software in an environment where copyright law doesn't exist.
I also assume that means that the GGP is implying that the GPL's "golden rule" requirement is a necessary restriction to ensure a healthy FLOSS ecosystem. Or at least that the FLOSS ecosystem wouldn't be as vibrant if 3-clause BSD were the only type of FLOSS license.
Ruby Language is driven by Matz from Japan. I'm sure there are other projects from East Asia as well that I can't name at the moment.
If you're using a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation, those are also developed by Japanese companies in East ASia.
If you want to look at smartphone apps developed in East Asia, there are many that are very influential such as Line in Japan, Kakao in Korea, WeChat and Alipay in China, etc. Granted these smartphone apps use either Java or Objective-C but they are 'made in East Asia."
In fact, for the China smartphone market, because China blocks most non-Chinese Internet services via the Great Firewall (i.e. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) the vast majority of Chinese apps are made in China. If you don't live in China or Japan or Korea, you probably don't use the apps that are made for those markets.
I agree that this model of iterative improvement won't yield the next big technological breakthrough. But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either. They might make a product a little bit flatter or give it another camera, but I can't think of a real game changer in the last five years.
Once all the technology is there and just improves iteratively the described model seems to be better suited to find as many local optima in the possible product space as possible (and not just a few big ones).
I could see how a lack of patents would lead to more secrecy in R&D labs. If what you are doing is truly novel and complicated (like developing a smaller node type in processor manufacturing) keeping the research secret would keep you as safe from competitors as patents. And if you aren't (like inventing rounded corners on smartphones) then you shouldn't have gotten the patent in the first place imho.
Yet they continue to attract global capital investment flows that crowd out funding for others (like those R&D labs, because they have their own in house labs with no real pressure to get anything novel to market) to explore something that might yield the next breakthrough.
I know it might not be the best thing to say, but i'm glad that the global economy is starting another downturn with major industries that have provided a boon starting to lose the impact it's had because it will incentivize the marginal person to pursue new opportunities because they no longer have enough economic uplift.
I assume by "east Asia", you mean the People's Republic of China, and not, say, Japan or Korea.
And do you mean software that comes out of Chinese companies?
Certainly I use software developed in China, but usually by individual developers rather than a company.
But think about smart phone software - certainly there is plenty that comes out of China, Korea and Japan.
I think this is changing with the death of Moore's law. In the past, it was almost always better to follow conventional hardware standards because chips kept on getting better extremely quickly. In the 18 months or so it would take an engineering team to come up with some custom hardware, the general purpose Intel hardware would improve so much that it made more sense to wait than to make something custom.
However now, Moore's law is pretty much dead. Processor performance is improving, but it's no longer on an exponential. Today, to gain an extra X% of performance, your best bet is often build your own hardware or ASIC customized to your particular use case. We see this everywhere now, with Apple building their own chips, folks making custom chips for AI and blockchain, and ARM's comparatively customizable architecture beating out Intel's relatively closed one.
With the death of Moore's law, coupled with the unceasing desire to suck out more performance from similar hardware, we're now seeing far more fragmentation than we did in the 90s, 00s, or early 10s.
For example there are phone manufacturers in China that don't follow the silly trend of making phones slimmer, more fragile and with smaller batteries. Another example are mini notebooks like the GPD Pocket and its many clones which you can (could? haven't looked in a while) only get from china.
I'm a happy user of both product categories and don't think any western company could have been convinced to build these. The market is just too small.
Since I find myself in these small markets quite often (I love robust/rugged devices, phones with hardware keyboards, open hardware, ...) that's a super useful development for me. And I think there are more people like me, maybe with different wishes, but in similarly small markets, that would profit from more product diversity and easier customization of products.
In the western world, this is unfortunately not the case. Getting something produced is very expensive because our labor, machine, and real estate costs. Outsourcing makes it cheaper, once you have that pipeline in place. So if I innovate here without protection but pay the expensive price to have produced here, there is a significant advantage for person #2 with the China factory pipeline in place to steal my invention and significantly undercut my costs.
I do like his idea and wish our 'prototype' maker economy was more efficient in the US, but China has paid a high environmental toll to be in that place and it is a price we are not willing to pay here in the U.S.
For things like UI patterns and non-trademarkable design decisions, I think letting good ideas spread quickly is great for the pace of innovation. Good ideas of those kinds more quickly become table-stakes, and the scales tilt further towards "can execute" and "can consistently innovate" over "had a great idea".
Thats what Steve might have imagined....apple tooth brush, apple car, apple air/water coolers, apple shoes may be. Making phone bigger and edge to edge won't help. Every product, every domain needs to be explored. Current "WRITERS BLOCKS" of new fresh idea could only be crossed by just going with flow and just make better version of every chinese stuff...Who knows what product might strike the market.
So I would say having a culture within the HW community that helps support people who want to use chips that are inaccessible to most people because documentation and support is hard for a small company then that is great.
But advocating that somebody who figures out how to make a novel device that uses a complex set of parts that dramatically changes the paradigm and takes years to develop is then immediately copied then we need to protect that. 20 years for a patent? Maybe that’s too long for some areas.. maybe 5 years but then enforce patents more strongly for obvious copy cats?
You're going to have to explain this in more detail; on its face, it doesn't make sense.
Then I would tell you to quit doing business with such companies. There are lots of companies that are quite happy to give you information (I would cite TI, for example).
If you don't like these kinds of policies, then, for example, do your work on a Beaglebone (TI, with almost everything documented) instead of an RPi (Broadcom, good luck with that).
Now, I will say that sometimes documentation is just terrible. But, sadly, even big customers can't always avoid that.
Do most of these ‘factory’ startups make a profit? How do they get investment? It seems like this is only possible in an export-driven economy.
Patents might have been fine in local economy of 25M 100 years ago but they are definitely are not in global economy of 7B today.