Comment by tim-- | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tim-- | Hacker News Reader

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Why does the printer design being NC licensed mean that you won't be able to purchase one?

To me, it seems like this license makes the most sense for everyone. The designer(s) of the printer get to sell a printer that no doubt took more than a few days worth of work to go from idea to "hey look, it prints something", and everyone else gets to see how the design works, to either improve, or create a new design based on learnings from this project. Hopefully that brand new design is licensed more liberally!

But I sure as hell would love an open printer that has a less than ideal license, especially when the alternative is basically getting a new printer from one of four companies (Canon, Epson, HP... did I miss anyone?)

The world needs more open source hardware. I'm currently trying to tackle an open source washing machine and heat pump dryer in my spare time. Will it ever turn into a built project? Probably not, but I sure as hell want to make sure that every peice that I've worked on so far is released to the world if it means that the next few people can finish or fix the design.

The fact that we see __washing machines__ as something that's not worth supporting after 6 years is honestly disgusting to me. It's not a flat screen TV, I don't see the design of a washing machine improving radically in my generation.

But if it does, it should be able to be retrofitted, rather than replacing an entire machine.

> Why does the printer design being NC licensed mean that you won't be able to purchase one?

> To me, it seems like this license makes the most sense for everyone. The designer(s) of the printer get to sell a printer that no doubt took more than a few days worth of work to go from idea to "hey look, it prints something", and everyone else gets to see how the design works, to either improve, or create a new design based on learnings from this project. Hopefully that brand new design is licensed more liberally!

Let's consider a hypothetical. It might not happen, but I'd bet that it does. The project launches. They get funded. They successfully ship the hardware. Once. And then... oh, it doesn't matter. They retire. They disappear. They get hit by a bus. They want to do another run but funding falls through. They try to do another run but there are manufacturing problems and after a couple years everyone gives up. Heck, maybe they get bought by $EVIL_MAINSTREAM_PRINTER_MANUFACTURER to kill this competition. It really doesn't matter how, what matters is that if anything happens to this one group of 3 people, nobody's allowed to sell this thing ever again, which means the only way to get new parts, let alone a whole replacement machine, is to personally have enough DIY skill to make it yourself. And that's too high a bar.

They're coming at it from the software side, but the FSF articulates it pretty well:

> Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. Paid, professional support for free software fills an important need.

> Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success.

- https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling

> But I sure as hell would love an open printer that has a less than ideal license, especially when the alternative is basically getting a new printer from one of four companies (Canon, Epson, HP... did I miss anyone?)

Yes, Source Available is better than nothing, but it's strictly worse than Open Source.

I don't disagree with any of your points.

> They retire. They disappear. They get hit by a bus.

Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.

Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.

You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use, the tinkerers have the plans so they can modify the hardware.

Then the commercial suppliers of replacement parts can pay a small percentage of their sales to the group that made the original designs, so they can continue to build new designs and improve existing ones.

Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.

> Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.

I don't think it's specific to hardware, but yes, I personally think this is a poor choice of license. There are actual Open Source licenses designed for hardware, but this isn't it.

> Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.

Dual-licensing would be nice, but still isn't Open Source and is still awkward; if the original folks are gone, there's nobody to grant those commercial licenses. If you really must, I think the best option is a BSL-style arrangement where you release it under a restrictive license up front but it automatically becomes truly Open Source, including allowing commercialization, after a year or two.

> You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use,

Point of order : GPL is absolutely not a NC license. You are free to make money off of GPL software, you just have to give code to anyone who gets binaries (possibly only if they ask, again this is general terms not legal advice).

> Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.

I'm kind of okay with that. Carbon copying and selling the design is giving something to the community: availability. I'm 100% on board with share-alike licenses, of course; anyone else selling it also being forced to share the source would be great. But a lot of my point is that as someone who wants open source printers to take over, I absolutely want these things to be ubiquitous, including by them being sold for pennies on the dollar by fly-by-night manufacturers and cloned and remixed and modified by companies that stand to make a fortune by doing so.

You could have an open source license that allows commercial use after 5 years since publishing.

You can have a license that becomes open source after a set time period yes, that's why I suggested a BSL-like ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License ) license.

If they disappear forever and there's nobody to enforce the license, you can break the license.

1. That only helps if you don't care about breaking the law.

2. That's great right up until they reappear 5 years later and start suing people. Or their estate does. Or if they got bought up specifically to crush competition.

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