Hacker News Reader

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer

> Open Source

> Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials. We hope that people will be able to repair, upgrade, and contribute improvements to their printers.

It's a nice hope, but they've conveniently banned being able to pay someone else to make parts for you, which will make it harder. Also, not Open Source. (Shared Source is still better than proprietary, but it's not F/OSS.)

View on HN

>Also, not Open Source.

Even CC highlights this

>NC licenses do not qualify as “open licenses” under the Open Definition, and works licensed under an NC license are not considered Free Cultural Works

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...

Kind of silly to name it Open Printer then, or at least ignorant of existing customs in this space of open hardware and software.

Calling it open source got the vaporware onto the HN front page.

and even more than that they literally use “open source” in their crowdsupply description

Seems like a reasonable license for someone who wants to sell their printer, but also publish the designs to allow for repair and for modifications to be shared by the community.

It's totally a reasonable license. It just isn't an Open Source license. There's nothing wrong with that. Not everything needs to be Open Source. But it's a little bit misleading to label something as such and then use a license that very explicitly isn't.

Well, that's unfortunate. That means another company couldn't, say, make and sell a variant of this that uses US letter sized paper instead of A4.

It would be awesome if one could craft a FOSS license that allows all FOSS uses of the project except creating a US letter variant.

A4 is awesome, and should become the US standard.

> It would be awesome if one could craft a FOSS license that allows all FOSS uses of the project except creating a US letter variant.

That can't happen, because your desired exclusion is incompatible with FOSS.

You could do that with a non-FOSS license.

It would be annoying for me to use paper with such strange dimensions. 8.5 x 11, 11 x 17, etc are much easier measurements for me to remember. The root 2 thing with European paper is pleasing though.

As a European, I have no clue what's the dimensions of A4, A5, etc. We just say A4. I don't think that laymen, like me, know anything about their real size, and I never had a problem not knowing it.

Its mathematically derived. A0 is exactly 1m2 in area. The side lengths are at a ratio of sqrt(2), that means you can cut any A paper size in half and get the size below it. B series are the same ratio, but B0 has a width of 1m instead.

Interstate, TIL

If you fold A4 in half you get A5, and if you double up A4 you get A3. They are all the same exact proportions.

US sizes don't work like that; the closest thing to A3 here doesn't have the same proportions as the closest thing to A4. Which absolutely sucks if you are designing a poster and need to make it bigger or smaller.

With international A sizes you can reuse the same design for any size. That's why I like them.

148x210 A5 297x210 A4 297x420 A3

Agree, I had to look it up as well. I can memorize A4 and A3 easily, but A5 is already counter-intuitive. It's an aspect ratio that's kept, so that's why the numbers don't add up easily.

With the paper in front of me it's easier, fold, double, you can navigate across all levels of A(n) quickly. All it takes is seeing this single graphic for a split second and you know all the DIN A-sizes, but the US sizes not. I enjoy the US Letter format though as a size, it feels somehow better than A5 as it's more square.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#/media/File:A_size_...

You cut an A4 to get A5, wasting 1mm ...; two sheets of A4 in an A3 ... there's only one pair of dimensions to remember.

Write the sizes in binary and bit-shift them?

Wasting one mm?

They're rounded to the nearest mm because the tolerances are about a millimetre, so there's no point specifying the paper size better than that.

Obligatory:

https://youtu.be/pUF5esTscZI?si=BVczkH72darILjBE

Binary Charles and Ray Eames would like a word.

Since the printer takes flexible roll sizes and cuts its own pages, probably it would work out of the box with letter right?

I do get your point though, it would be nice if this was not an NC license

Ah yes, looking at the actual specs, it looks like it does support 11 inch rolls as well.

While I think NC is a terrible license, hasn't it been settled in court that you can hire someone to produce CC-BY-NC material? You can't run a business selling the material, but you can be hired to produce it.

> You can't run a business selling the material, but you can be hired to produce it.

I'm not a lawyer, so it's not that hard to imagine that I'm missing nuance, but... what's the difference?

Also not a lawyer, but here's what I recall: If you are a shop, and you produce copies of something with the intent to sell it, that's commercial use. If you offer some kind of production service, and someone hires you to make produce something, you are acting as their agent. If they have the right to make copies themselves, you can make copies on their behalf.

I cannot offer and advertise this specific service. I can produce the part if somebody orders it.

I could order a 3d print of a part from somewhere; that somewhere's core business is not printing that specific thing.

That would probably depend on the jurisdiction?

Just because there was a court ruling in one country, doesn't necessarily mean it is legal in another country.

So what workarounds could be had? Contractor business where you hire someone for a few hours to make it for you? Business that sells something else at an elevated price but gives a CC-BY-NC material gift with every purchase?

You run 3D printers and they email you the files?

I was thinking "where do I order?" but then realized it's not actual OSH (Open Source Hardware) but just a publicity stunt.

This is a textbook case where the headline should be editorialized as it contains misinformation, and many are only ever gonna read the headline.

Once, a long time ago. Richard Stallman was pissed off at an hostile printer. We got Free Software just because. Yet the printer problem remains unsolved.

I still hope somebody, somewhere, will eventually get it done and commoditize printing forever, riding us of the mafia which is printer makers.

Inkjet printer makers sell printers way below cost of production, making the money on the ink.

There will always be enough people who would buy a $129 printer and postpone the reckoning in ink, instead of buying a $329 printer that can print reams using cheap bulk ink.

(Laser printers are superior anyway, unless you print photos.)

What keeps the production cost high?

A new inkjet-- especially if you're not getting a photo-optimized one-- isn't doing that much technically different from a 20-year-old one. You don't need 4800DPI and rich six-ink photo finishes if all you're asking for is one four-colour pie chart in a 20-page report, so you don't need to be at the edge of premium technology here.

So why can't they just keep manufacturing a 20-year-old DeskJet, using long-amortized tooling and fully-worked-out mechanicals, but with a new controller board to replace parallel with USB/Ethernet/Wi-fi?

In the mid 2000s, there was a model of inkjet printer that came with full size ink cartridges. It was usually priced "on sale" for less than the price of a new set of ink cartridges. Meaning if you did a normal amount of printing, it was more economically viable to buy a new printer every every few months and throw the old one away than it was to buy replacement cartridges.

It revealed a lot about the incentive structure of the inkjet printer market.

Are you thinking of a specific model? What model?

All models I personally experienced came with ink cartridges containing less ink than replacement cartridges. I participated in a ton of ink cartridge refilling during 1998-2007.

For most consumers back then, I could easily imagine that it was still more cost effective to buy new printers (with partial cartridges) than it was to buy replacements.

@dang - edit the title?

They say:

  Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair.

So for all those standard pieces this would not be an issue.

It still would mean a company cannot really offer to do repairs for you, wouldn’t it? They’d have to be able to prove that none of their employees looked at the design documents, ever.

CC licenses aren't viral in that way. I can write a CC BY-NC instruction and repair manual for a Ford Prefect, and a professional mechanic can use the information contained within to help them fix Ford Prefects. The NC aspect of the license just means they can't sell the repair manual, charge for entrance to a dramatic reading of the repair manual, etc: it doesn't apply constraints beyond an All Rights Reserved design doc from any other manufacturer.

So if Ford were to publish full schematics for the Perfect under a CC-NC license would it be permissible for a third party to use that in order to offer (commercial, for profit) manufacturing and assembly? Honest question, because I'm not clear where the line for these printers sits.

Off the top of my head (keeping in mind it's years since I last researched this), patent and trademark law are what prevents people cloning someone else's machine from the spec. So unless there are patents, I don't think you'd have a problem.

Yep, so you they replace the stepper.

But if the cartridge holder breaks, a repair service cannot print a new one.

And if PCB breaks, a repair service cannot order a new one either.

Lots of beneficial and spiritually open licenses are not recognized as OSS by OSI, so I wouldn't care much about what they think at this point.

That's fine, it's also not recognized by the FSF, DFSG, any BSD, or anyone else credible. Mostly because those "beneficial and spiritually open licenses" are in fact not beneficial or spiritually open, existing specifically to limit what users can do and cripple the community's ability to do anything the original vendor doesn't like or that might undercut their ability to make money.

I actually meant stuff like OQL that benefits the community while preventing corporations and other ill-behaved entities from abusing said community. I don't know much about the implications of CC-BY-NC specifically, but I guess it's unlikely to have been conceived with that in mind…?

In my understanding it should be fine to make parts to order and charge for that, but I may be wrong. What definitely isn’t covered is making parts in advance (anonymously) and sell them later with a profit.

Okay, but as someone who would have wanted to buy parts, that's a downside.

Absolutely

Reply on news.ycombinator.com