Main reason any company would pay for a brand name would be to increase sales. So if buying maslow trademark makes the company money, it will be a worthwhile investment. However if paying $XXX.XX yields no extra profit then why bother from a purely economical aspect. so if you do plan to go the paid route, price it within reach of expected profit margins.
If you wanted to, you could make it sort of a contest. Have the forum vote for their favorite distributor and let the top 1 or 2 use the maslow name free.
Hopefully free market selling of maslow yields the advantages of a competitive market place, lower prices, innovation and a better feature set. After all if all the distributors are selling the same, chains motors, etc. it just becomes a game of who has it in stock at the cheapest price.
Asking forkers to keep GNU license would stifle innovation IMHO. why invest time and money into making a product better, only to have the competition take your ideas, ship it off to china and undercut you putting you out of business??
Wild guess is most forkers will use the same hardware design so it becomes a mute point since the original design is already open to public.
Sometimes it can be that the spirit is more then the $.
How many of the non profit contributors will continue to offer their free service to a profit oriented organisation?
Probably almost all. There are many forums for different products that are made by a for profit company. Look at the X carve or Shaper Origin Forums for example. I could be wrong but Maslow probabaly (hopefully) made a great deal of profit off this idea.
I like the “Maslow: kit by ____” nomenclature. Don’t use fork as it is meaningless to the general public.
On GPL: I am not sure what is meant by this. As far as I know the list of kit components is not GPL, and cannot be, so I presume that GC + firmware is what was meant. Note that neither can the license of the current version of these be revoked, nor can any future development legally be changed to another license without agreement of most or all copyright holders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_relicensing
In most cases it is easier to re-implement from scratch than to get these agreements. And at that point I would contend that the machine is no longer a Maslow, and should not be referred to as such.
It is hard enough to try to support software questions for code where we have the source available, that I don’t think that we want to be in the position of supporting code that we have no knowledge of.
Recap: to me, “Maslow: kit by ___” should refer to any combination of hardware that works with the combination of software generated by the community, and that this software should be open source for community support to be meaningful.
“Asking forkers to keep the GPL license would stifle innovation”
Not at all. The whole point of the GPL is to guarantee that everyone has the right to innovate. And you don’t need to ask; you just license your stuff as GPL, and the law will ask, nicely or otherwise.
forkers are REQUIRED to keep the GNU license, otherwise they have no permission
to use the contributions from the community that are clearly under that license.
That’s not up for debate. If they don’t want to use the code (re-write
everything from scratch), they don’t have to comply with the license.
Official amateur opinion… @bar can sell/release/share the “Official Maslow Kit”. That can be expanded to version 1.0, 2.0 etc as needed.
Anything anyone else offers can be listed as “Maslow compatible” and must include the GNU.
Maslow is copyrighted, but to what level? USA, North America, World? That’s where china steps in…“oh, your copyright is only North America. We make cheaper”.
the maslow code and designs are copyrighted (but avaiable under the GPL)
the name “Maslow” is a trademark (in the category of equipment or something like
that, not in all uses).
Trademarks need to be policed or you loose them, so there needs to be a way of
allowing people to use the name under specific conditions, and of people asking
to use the name under other conditions.
@bar my interest in seeing the project continue are based on equal parts innovation and maintaining open source/simple systems. I suspect that if you retained sole use of the name for the business/organization, but allowed its use for individual products that met your base design goals/criteria it would quickly become a Xerox issue. In their case that was bad (according to my Marketing professors), however in your scenario that might be a really good thing. People xerox things all the time and we know what they mean…the trick is focusing on ensuring that outcome here meanswhat you want it too.
As for straight up licensing the name, if you don’t need or want the money there is no value in doing it. The only reason I would license the name when everything about your product is open source is what??? If you are being told its to increase sales potential thats disingenuous. The only business reason for them to do that is to lock up the market. If they can stop competitors from referencing the Maslow name they will in the short run control the market and will in so doing stifle innovation or worse like Makerbot erode the loyal open source community that made them what they are.
Write a set of guidelines for how people should use the Maslow name as a royalty-free license agreement. I’m sure the community could help if needed. You probably will never need to even threaten legal enforcement. The community will put pressure on anyone breaking it.
Hey Bee, Sorry, but I misunderstood the open source concept. I have just cancelled the ebay listing and edited my original post to reflect that I was mistaken to offer this.
I am not saying you are wrong or it is wrong. I’m saying this is where the sticky part comes in for the group. I would offer Bumper stickers and Shirts because I’m proud of my Maslow. I’m free to do this for myself. Am I free to do it for profit? My use of the logo has been with clear markings “An independent effort”. My discussions before using the logo was that it is clear I’m not acting on behalf of Maslow. Is it a Maslow product or a Bee product? This is why I have clearly kept the Blue Smoke Herder Shield clear of the term “Maslow Shield” I would like to consider calling it “Maslow Brains by Bee” in a future rendition. With the change over in who is handling kits this gets sticky as in I don’t want to muddy the waters and be clear what I do and what someone else does. I can say I reached out and asked before I went forward.
I did not mean to stop you, just to point out we are in uncharted waters.
I don’t have the right to tell you or anyone here what to do unless it involves me directly.
I applaud both your effort and enthusiasm.
I’m attempting to fuel the discussion of what we choose as group.
