However, if this effort is genuinely for developers to be able to support the project, then I am cool with that. So, I can assure you,if this effort is just to assist a clone manufacturer… my next product will be closed source… People need to ask, seriously… Would you if you had the funds, invest in a product that gives you no competitive advantage, that you need to support, design, test and prove, then be happy when someone can start copying without risk or R&D costs? The intention was never to create bulk wholesale copies of the hardware, and send the legitimate manufacturers broke. Phill K did an awesome job bringing that to market… but it was just directly copied by hobbyking… how does Phill profit out of that.īy making our stuff open, we allow people to take inspiration from our work… so someone who is designing a different bit of hardware, can grab concepts without having to reinvent the wheel

And its conversations like this one that truly make me question my licensing choices. And I believe the better it will be documented and available for everyone, the better quality will have all “clones”. It is always a decision of developer to go or not to go with OSH. It is about to be better than others in production, troubleshooting and improvement. IMHO business is not about fencing your design and hiding details in case you decided to go with OSH. But let me ask you one more question: would it possible to have pixracer or auav-x2 implemented w/o original pixhawk sources published under OSH terms? If people too much concerned about clones, it will better for them to not go with OSH.

Does it means the OSH (open source hardware) is bad idea in general? Does it mean any OSH developer will not success due to clones? And BTW, what are clones in case sources are open for everyone? What about the case clone could have not worse but better quality? Why developers should provide support as a company to users of clones? Are you sure they unable to ask “Give me pls your serial hash code pls” (exactly as 3DR did it refusing to support clones with success)?

Schdoc kicad