Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

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TaylorAlexander

In my mind, if everything was open source or there were no IP restrictions, a lot of this stuff would happen automatically. Companies would tend to standardize on parts after a while as everyone would clone the good parts of everyone else. Open source 3D printers always have cheap replacement parts widely available.

These regulations are trying to use the state to correct for problems that in some cases occur because the state granted them monopoly protections for their IP. The state could simply not offer those protections to prevent a lot of these issues.

See also a recent comment I wrote on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512363

As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

Wouldn't the manufacturers just take over, and only survive in the lowest cost place for manufacturing? The inventors/designers would get nothing and no one would want to do that anymore. What would be the incentive to share your open sourced designs?

Like it'd be pretty easy for one state-supported giant manufacturer to just build every single open sourced product, and sell it direct. The whole world would buy from this cheapest producer. No one else would get anything, and supply chains would become even more brittle.

Another way to think about it is if knockoffs were guaranteed identical to the originals, but at a lower price. Everyone would just buy the knockoffs. No one would want to make anything new anymore.

> As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions:

The Chitubox people are the counterexample.

Because they exist in a situation without IP restrictions, they are trying to tie everything to subscription and add encryption to the harwdare in order to extract money.

And, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. My personal opinion is that you should be able to get paid for developing good software. However, without IP protections, people can just scarf up your work.

I see this from both the perspective of machine tools and electronic test equipment. Anything under $5K has shit customer support--deal with it. Anything above $25K generally has ok customer support. Anything in between gets crushed out of the market.

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