Comment by mrsssnake
1 year ago
Selling any parts or upgrades by third parties will be heavily limited by the BY-NC-SA 4.0. You could not build the printer and use it in a small company office.
The non-commercial clause is not only unnecessary (who is going to mass market it?), but license also means firmware is proprietary software, it absolutely is not Open Source. Sad to see even seemingly user approached projects building on foundations they misuse the terms of.
Of course you could use the printer commercially. You mustn’t sell it. Using the printer is not sharing it’s design.
It's horrible and useless. An "open source" printer should allow someone to open a factory and mass produce them. I shouldn't have a dependency on the designer on something marketed as open source. That's no different than normal. You could never reasonably prevent people from making one-offs anyway, not that it's cost-efficient, or would ever be worth doing.
Attribution license it. Name it TheOpenPrinter@Patreon.com and force manufacturers to engrave it on each one. Don't pull nonsense. Crowdfunding imo sounds like they're planning to be unsuccessful at actually making them, and just to make a living off failing to make them for a year or two.
How about just getting the design tight, modular, and small-shop ready, and not even attempting to mass produce them? Leave that to the experts.
would using some sort of GPL allow for that?
As with anything GPL would allow others to use your soft (of course if you sell or give it them first) as they wish, but additionally "locks it open" so they must sell/give on the same rules too.
No? That's only according to your definition of open source. There are others, some restricting competition, some restricting certain usage like military, some restricting certain countries... We can argue about those restrictions, but such a bold claim as "it's useless" sounds impulsive (my first though was harsher).
A definition the people who wrote the licence agree with
> NC licenses do not qualify as “open licenses” under the Open Definition, and works licensed under an NC license are not considered Free Cultural Works.
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...
> That's only according to your definition of open source
No, words mean things. Open Source precludes restrictions on field of use or commercialization, and no credible organization (OSI, DFSG, FSF, Creative Commons, any of the BSDs) claims otherwise.
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There are advantages - just look at the 3d printer landscape. Having companies making these and selling them breeds a huge ecosystem around upgrades, drives down prices, and makes it easy for anyone to use the device because it lowers the barrier to entry to about as low as they can get it because that's what sells.
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You could sell parts anyways and violate the license.
"Open source" =/= requiring breaking the law to distribute the thing in question
Otherwise, how does it differ from the regular HP/Brother printers, in that regard?