I know this might be a continual posting, but I think organisations like OpenDesk have a good business model that is helping designer and makers of open source projects to be able to make a living out of their work while still keeping the CC and open source element for personal use active.
I was the commercial director of OpenGift, who is an open source blockchain platform making open source software development more accessible for small businesses.
I am also the founder of an online consumer champion award winning platform that took over Ā£230m in online orders in the UK before I sold it 3 years ago.
I would like to help makers of opensource furniture and designers to make art and furniture more accessible for everyone and have built the platform to do this, it called Commissionit.com
We give 51% of our profits to charity/social enterprise/environmental projects that the client and the maker choose on every project.
Unfortunately most individuals and businesses would not know how to build all your cool designs using a CNC router or even know they exist. Why canāt you license your designs and making services commercially so that everyone can make a good honest living?
If this is something that maslow is already working on then great.
I would particularly like to focus on building stuff using recycled sheet materials. Is anyone doing that?
I was keeping an eye open if more links show up in other posts
The platform looks like a great idea and I see MaslowCNC relations.
If you can keep the āmarketingā low until we get all get to know you more, that could work
Hey, no problem. I wont post anything until i get an email from you on info@commissionit.com, if thatās ok? Can also send you allot more info about stuff have been doing with Co Operatives like open.coop no more links from me but if you google it you will find ALLOT of useful people, also have been working with the ceo of Social Enterprise UK on their Ā£1b UK corporate challenge, google that as well
Lastly, please can you arrange for me to buy one of your kits ?
hi please also google open coop, i was a guest speaker at the last conference last year, also google Social Enterprise UK & their corporate challenge to spend Ā£1b through social enterprises by the end of this year. I worked with their ceo on a tec solution for that
can you email me through my website, i wont post another thing until i get you approval ā¦
Iām not the only admin or moderator.
You are not silenced. Perhaps plenty of Maslowians around the globe have been waiting for a chance to get some of the bucks spent back, by offering a cutting service.
Upcycling is what the planet needs, so the platform is at the pulse of time.
Keep it coming!
The new hardware suppliers are @Metalmaslow@2cents and @MakerMadeCNC.
Iām just a chip-monk with no relation to Maslow, other then being proud to a member of this community.
Hi @Commissionit,
I must say I received your post like a shocking propaganda. So I take time here to explain a different point of view to help the debate for our MAslowCNC and open sourcing community.
That really triggered me when you pointed out the dogma of
Now let me give some advice here when we talk about being be part of something: it is important to give more than to take. This may sound strange to some people but it makes perfect sense when we consider the things we can give without losing. Here is what I mean:
We would have nothing here to share if no one first freely gave to us. We give a drop of water and we receive an ocean. So is the world of open source communities.
And Pulling the open source community off into a competitive proprietary race would definitely be a dishonest living.
One must be careful when writing:
When opendesk offered their designs, they helped people around the work understand how we can now get out of the retail distribution and programmed obsolescence lock down. That was a huge contribution. Opendesk is not offering designs anymore, they need to find their way. Fair. But we can now see what has changed, communities will continue to thrive because we can all draw and share.
Thinking Business Model and dropping:
is the first step toward a diplomatic incident here: If you are not carefull, you could foster greed with such statements. 1% of the people own too much of the rest of the world. So this is actually a good thing to let people earn a living, but especially within communities who need help acheive basic Maslow needs. And that is not for the 1% to come in and talk like they know. Because they donāt.
What would be wrong would be to try to create passive income out of our open source giving communities. Why wrong?
Open Source projects are about creating a pay forward contribution.
If you are looking for payback, then use the open source ressources without locking them down. Otherwise that would definitely be a very dishonest living.
If business administration schools teach the next commercial directors how to plunder ressources and privatize commons, that would definitely not be contributing to make a better world.
What would be wrong - for example - would be to get a commission on transactions between makers and users. That would be a fundamental mistake for several reasons:
Money and income are very unevenly available arounf the world.
Designers could end up be bound with contracts that would prevent them from offering their designs on other platforms, effectively locking them down.
What is the right price for a design? Is it a broker to decide?
To that last point, I would like to mention the gaming brokers like Steam. What is hapenning now is that games are becoming free to start, then pay as you go if you like. The perverse effect we oberve now is that game designers are rewarded when they create addictive Pavlov rewarding machines and get people to register their credit card for continuous micro-transactions. That makes people effectively rent addictive gaming experiences.
Do we want makers rent the right to make designs? Do we want to continue the growth of nonsense situations like farmers in some counties now forced to pay GMO seeds to grow crops? Is that going to help communities be more resilient? No.
The open source community is working to create wealth for everyone.
Licencing a design is definitely a way to lock people out of solutions. And convincing people that they deserve to get rich with their designs is a preaching act I strongly discourage.
Making objects for someone is an honest productive work that deserve retribution. Licensing designs is getting people lose contact with communities and dive into the whole copyright question and the greedy desire to prevent others from designing something like it.
Some businesses will try to lock us into proprietary CAD or CAM softwares, some will try to lock our design into cloud services. But efforts like MaslowCNC are about unlocking communities.
So letās consider how one:
Because the ways initally presented are suggesting the opposite .
Which objectives do you see? Do you see some interesting proposals in what I share with you here? We hear sayings like āmoney talksā or āsuccess speaks for itselfā, but the first thing to have in mind is what is oneās definition of success? And how money can corrupt minds.
Lets talk about FREE stuff
If you are offering 51% of incomes, or even anything free, you can expect to get a lot of people check what you collect, how you may try to build a community and lock it into something.
using the words āopenā and āfreeā requires transparency and care to not be misleading.
Free could mean you āget it without paying now if you accept those conditionsā. But what is really free is āfreedom to use, modify, understand, share and redistribute without being bound contractuallyā.
Now what is open is not always free.
My advice is that there is a lot a space for improvement in this topic to let one
Thanks for reading and hopefully weāll open the debate to nothing personnal but everything for better community wisdom and prosperity.
Am I out of line to say that if we are worried about this is it because we feel threatened that we will not be the 1% of even Maslowians?
I may not understand quite as comprehensively as @c0depr1sm but if anyone can make money selling what they work hard at I am happy for them. I want to be like them. I plan to be like that. I believe my family will prosper from my ideas and your ideas. I have shared my ideas with the community and been grateful that others share their ideas.
I hope you make money from my ideas and that I make money from your ideas.
I, for one, am not worried that someone that has money also has a heart and and ideas for our community. @Commissionit 's idea sounds like a different perspective, grant it, but I know that this community is built on different perspectives.
I just quoted Dr. Seuss earlier this week: You have to be odd to be number one!
I am very happy to now be part of this community and look forward to making my kit and contributing projects and supporting you guys.
I assumed designs were provided under standard Creative Commons license terms but canāt see anything about any license terms? Could you please clarify what this is?
First of all, I would like to point out I am not part of the 1% of the planet who owns and plunders our resources for their benefit.
Far from it, I have been campaigning for peopleās rights for many years.
I totally get what you are doing and agree with your principles. I am not advocating you change what you are doing. I am just putting forward a suggestion for open debate on a possible option you can consider as a channel to market that could be tried out in addition to what you are doing without detaching away from what you are doing.
I donāt have all the answers, what I do have is a deep desire to help make positive change happen around art, design and making stuff. I believe you need to be the change you want to see in the world.
Unfortunately, most people donāt know what a Social Enterprise actually is. It means you think itās ok to make money as long as you treat PEOPLE & PLANNET BEFORE PROFIT.
You also have to give 51% of your profits back to benefit society or the planet. If every company did this, I donāt think would we would have most of the problems we have now.
I also believe itās far better to give people the tools so they can support themselves instead of charity in the first place.
I have just spent the last 2 years FULL TIME devoting my time trying to educate myself and supporting a number of projects like collectiveone . org (develop open, decentralized and collaborative initiatives) in addition to the ones already highlighted.
If you have not read the book "Reinventing Organisations" I would recommend it
I have been trying to support charities, social enterprises, Co-Operatives and not for profits but have found people have to spend a large part of their time trying to continually get funding or have a day job to pay their bills and do unrelated commercial stuff on the side and this means those projects donāt get very far.
The world trade system is broken, the planet is being killed by corporate greed. What you are doing is a fantastic approach to helping solve this problem but in my opinion, your approach could have far more significant impact.
Perhaps additional approaches could be tried in parallel to what you are doing that is based on how 99% of commerce really happens.
All money raised from selling designs and making stuff can go directly back into supporting your project.
Perhaps funding the cost of your kits to people is less developed countries. To funding the cost of developing more advanced kits with a professional level of precision would help your mission.
What is so wrong with makers in this community (who choose to, might only be 5% of your community) from :
Receiving either a royalty type payment every time one of their designs are used in a commercial only project. The design can remain open for all, it does not have to be locked in any way.
Receiving payment for making stuff for clients?
Those makers or designers could (if they wanted) choose to contribute the money made back into your project or use that money to help support doing this full time. Either way they would also know that 51% of the profit we make could also go back into your project.
