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 don’t.
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 let’s 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 “money talks” or “success speaks for itself”, but the first thing to have in mind is what is one’s 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 “open” and “free” requires transparency and care to not be misleading.
Free could mean you “get it without paying now if you accept those conditions”. But what is really free is “freedom to use, modify, understand, share and redistribute without being bound contractually”.
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 we’ll open the debate to nothing personnal but everything for better community wisdom and prosperity.
Regards,