MakerBot vs Open Source
Domingo, Septiembre 23rd, 2012Un cierto revuelo en la comunidad de Open Source Hardware [OSH] con el reciente anuncio de que MakerBot distribuirá su próxima máquina la Replicator 2 con licencia propietaria para algunas de sus partes… Múltiples debates estos días en la red. Reproduzco la intervención de Zach Hoeken uno de los fundadores originales de MakerBot, y de Adrian Bowyer, el inventor del conceptod e Reprap y desarrollador del primer prototipo. Pongo también el último árbol genealógico del desarrollo de Reprap…
21.09.2012 / http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/makerbot-and-open-source-a-founder-perspective/#comment-37
MakerBot vs. Open Source. A Founder Perspective
My name is Zachary Smith aka Hoeken. I have been building 3D printers since 2007 as part of the RepRap project. I created a non-profit foundation (the RRRF) dedicated to pushing open source 3D printing forward. In 2009, I invited my friends Adam Mayer and Bre Pettis to go into business with me building 3D printers. Thus, MakerBot Industries was born. Fast forward to April, 2012 when I was forced out of the very same company. As a result, I have zero transparency into the internal workings of the company that I founded. See this article by Chris Thompson for more infomation.
I do not support any move that restricts the open nature of the MakerBot hardware, electronics, software, firmware, or other open projects. MakerBot was built on a foundation of open hardware projects such as RepRap and Arduino, as well as using many open software projects for development of our own software. I remain a staunch supporter of the open source movement, and I believe the ideals and goals of OSHW remain true. I have never wavered from this stance, and I hope that I never do. Future me, beware.
I have been withholding judgement until hearing official word regarding the open source nature of the latest MakerBot printer. I’m trying to contact people to find out what the real scoop is but so far nobody is talking, and my ex-partners are not returning phone calls or emails. It certainly doesn’t look good. The best information I have found is a load of corporate double-speak bullshit that has come to characterize my interactions with MakerBot in recent memory.
If these allegations do prove true, it would be a sad day indeed for the open hardware movement. Not only would it be a loss of a large Open Hardware manufacturer, but it would also be a loss of a poster child for the movement. Many people have pointed at MakerBot and said “Yes, OSHW is viable as a business model, look at how successful MakerBot is.” If they close those doors, then it would give people who would say OSHW is not sustainable ammunition for their arguments. It would also discourage new OSHW companies from forming. That is a sad thing indeed.
For me, personally, I look at a move to closed source as the ultimate betrayal. When I was forced out, it was a normal, if unfortunate, clash of wills where one person must stay and one person must go. I swallowed my ego and left, because I knew that the company I founded would carry my ideals further into the world. Regardless of our differences, I had assumed that Bre would continue to follow the principles that we founded the company on, and the same principles that played a major part in the success of our company. Moving from an open model to a closed model is contrary to everything that I stand for, and as a co-founder of MakerBot Industries, it makes me ashamed to have my name associated with it.
Bre Pettis, please prove me wrong by clarifying exactly what license MakerBot will be releasing the design files and software under. That is all we (the community) wants.
In closing, I would like to point out the Open Source Hardware Definition, which MakerBot has endorsed. This document spells out in very clear terms what it means to be an open hardware company. I’ll leave this here for you to ponder:
Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware’s source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it. Ideally, open source hardware uses readily-available components and materials, standard processes, open infrastructure, unrestricted content, and open-source design tools to maximize the ability of individuals to make and use hardware. Open source hardware gives people the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs.
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Adrian Bowyer / en el hilo de la discusión en:
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/20/fixing-misinformation-with-information/
September 21, 2012 at 10:19 am
A number of people have asked me what my opinion is on all this, and this seems an appropriate place to set it down.
First, declarations of interest: as most people know, I was one of those who put up the initial money for MakerBot when it branched off from RepRap. As a consequence I own a very small percentage of the company. That percentage gives me no say in how the company is run, nor access to any prior information about any of its actions or intentions before they are made public. I also own a much larger percentage of one of the RepRap companies, RepRap Professional Ltd.. RepRap Professional Ltd. is a completely open-source company, and will always be so.
What follows is a re-statement of something that I originally wrote here.
My purpose in this comment is to set out why RepRap is, and always will be, Open Source and how this relates to MakerBot in the real world. The real world is the world of biology and physics. In the real world hard things happen (as opposed to the soft happenings in the world of legal, corporate and financial froth).
Eccentrically, given that purpose, I shall start with a completely irrelevant fact: I think that Open Source is a good thing. If I ruled the world (which, fortunately for the world and – more importantly – fortunately for me, I don’t), all engineering projects from the writing of bank software to the construction of nuclear power stations would be run in an Open Source way. Given my approval of Open Source, you might imagine that that was the reason that I chose it for RepRap.
Not so.
Even if I thought that Open Source was an evil pinko conspiracy to undermine capitalism, to destroy healthy competition, and to usurp the perfect system of intellectual property rights given to humanity for all time by God when he wrote them on stone tablets at Mount Sinai, I would still have made RepRap Open Source.
The good moral and political arguments for Open Source are inconsequential as far as RepRap is concerned, and RepRap is not Open Source because of them.
Remember that RepRap is not about 3D printing. It is about self-replication. The purpose of the RepRap Project is to make a useful self-replicating machine. We just happen to be using 3D printing to do that, because it is currently the most appropriate technology to achieve our ends. But we could equally imagine a self-replicating laser-cutter. Indeed, many people on the RepRap Project are also working on precisely that.
Ask yourself: which will be the more numerous 3D printer (or laser cutter): one that can self-replicate, or one that has to be made in a conventional factory?
Then ask yourself: which will be the more numerous self-replicator: one for which all the plans are freely available, or one for which the plans are hidden?
RepRap is Open Source because Darwinian game-theoretic analysis says that Open Source is an evolutionarily-stable strategy for a useful replicating machine that is intended to maximise its numbers in the world. This is a completely amoral fact, and it is the reason that I made RepRap Open Source. RepRap is Open Source because that strategy must out-compete closed-source systems in reproductive fitness.
Some of you may think that I am rather lax in my pursuit of those people who would appropriate RepRap technology and close it off, thereby breaking the terms of the GPL. The reason that I am lax (and I am) is because I don’t care about those people. I don’t care about them because I know that by closing off the path that they have chosen, they have turned it into a reproductive cul de sac; they have made their machine sterile.
If I am lax, others may be more attentive. This comment is in no way intended to instruct, or even to request, others to act or to see things as I do. In particular, RepRap developers retain the copyright in their own developments, and may wish to enforce licencing with more rigour than I. Go to it, I say. I merely started this project and (mostly indirectly) all the companies that have flowed from it; I would be alarmed and upset if I were to find my subsequent actions (or lack of them) taken as a prescriptive model.
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Every RepRap can make RepRaps. Also, every closed-source 3D printer, and every non-replicating 3D printer such as a MakerBot, can make RepRaps. But RepRap won’t make any of them. The exponential mathematics of the RepRap population against the rest follows inexorably. Chasing licence infringers will make almost no difference.
If you are taking part in the RepRap project, then I hope that you believe Open Source to be a morally and politically good thing, as I do. But if you don’t believe that, you are still welcome to take part, by me at least. When it comes to the success or failure of RepRap, moral beliefs, legal constraints and the flow of money are almost completely irrelevant.
It is the evolutionary game theory that matters.
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Fuente con imagen a mayor resolución: http://reprap.org/mediawiki/images/e/ec/RFT_timeline2006-2012.png
