No doubt life needs and comforts for zero price are ideal.

In regard to general discussion, the nearest I've found is the G+
group Post-Scarcity Warriors, recently followed by Open Manufacturing
at G+. If you start a G+ group, Open Manufacturing will follow you. :)

Post-Scarcity Warriors
https://plus.google.com/u/0/108518263530170635868/posts

A good question to ask: What is needed for a zero price outcome?

0. Open Data
1. Public Resource Interface. Like ‘The Solar System: Explore Your
Backyard’ meets Freecycle meets Facebook meets TinkerCAD.
* Production Engine
** Provides a design platform to create a novel design or uses
ready-made designs
** Determines where product and product parts are made
* Distribution Engine
** Alerts automated vehicles to retrieve and deliver materials or products
2. Common Land. (i.e. La Via Campesina and Rajastan)
3. Materials Commons. Free material for product construction. Start
with dumps before exploring extraction.
4. Industrial Commons. Places to go to make, learn, or have them made.
(i.e. Open Source Ecology and Wikispeed)
5. Robotics Network. For transport, manufacturing, and service. Robots
are divided into three types:
* Fabots - make things
* Servibots - feed materials to fabots and distribots or people
* Distribots - deliver materials to or from factory and user location
6. Transport Commons. Distribots are registered for non-commercial use
for free to use road or rail built to last
7. Labor Commons. People willingly, and with a sense of purpose, work
for free, and find such work fulfilling.

We nearly have everything for mainstreaming true gift economy. Its
possible today and will only become more practical as technology
develops; or better; as technology itself becomes easier and more
interesting to develop.

Free Distribution
Autonomous vehicles, without needing a driver, enables the
streamlining of distribution: shipping a product from the factory to
the end user, removing the need to staff or waste space as warehouses
or retail shops. The Edison 2 four passenger hybrid vehicle boasts a
very impressive 350mpg. Have vehicles chain together during transit
and this could prevent vehicles from refueling, having batteries
charged from tire rotations (and solar panels if needed) as the
vehicle(s) in front pull the train.

Automated Distribution Systems
http://p2pfoundation.net/Automated_Distribution_Systems

Free Production
ABB is preparing 1 million robots to replace 1.2 million Foxconn
workers; and those put out of work would find the gift option more
attractive than other options. ASIMO's latest demostration shows the
best in tactile robotics today, for instance, the ability to twist and
remove the top lid of a cup and pour liquid into another cup, almost
as quickly as a person can, is rather impressive. Bosch is training a
PR2 how to use its power tools. ROS recently launched the
ROS-Industrial platform.

Free Space & Materials
Here it is a matter of establishing the space and raw materials within
it as a free resource. How to persuade land owners is a very good
question to answer. Difficulty may increase if a material is rare or
quantity of demand is high. Homesteading provides one answer; reviving
local food production; distributing the homesteader's surplus locally
by means of perhaps a Segway-based robotic delivery system able to
carry multiple containers to homes in the neighborhood. Community
supported agriculture (CSA) platforms are another option, where people
buy shares that ideally pay for food production, equally distributed
come harvest. For a non-commercial scenario, all the farmer's material
and labor needs are gifted by the local community in return for great
food. When this idea was mentioned to my CSA director friend, he was
cynical toward the idea, but if we have improved online interfaces
helping people gift stuff in the way Kickstarter and Indiegogo gifts
money, then the coordination ability of our hypothetical public
resource interface (able to visualize the once 'invisible hand')
ensures the farmer gets what the farm needs for free for the benefit
of the farmer's community.

Conclusion
Common sense expects a free-commercial hybrid form at first. Like
Linux, most of its developers are paid, but the product does well
because the code is open and free: it reduces development redundancy;
a problem solved for one company is solved for another user with the
same challenge; further reducing costs and increasing efficiency and
quality. Commercial firms producing hardware with several parts will
begin to fund free/open hardware parts to replace elements of
commercial products for competitive advantage: a better quality, less
expensive product than rivals in the marketplace, until common space
and material rights are standardized and robotics software and
hardware become more flexible and creative to render any commercial
element of products obsolete.

Best.
Nathan

As mentioned in the discussion quoted, maybe a Google+ presence would
be useful for this (or Diaspora?). I think a dedicated wiki could be
very valuable as well.

In the meantime, the google group is there for anyone interested:
http://groups.google.com/group/insync-discuss/ . (I'm thinking of
changing the name of the group to something more informative - e.g.
NCI or something like that.)

Sincerely
David

On May 6, 4:46 am, Nathan Cravens <knu...@gmail.com> wrote:

By "Free Software" I mean the FSF definition [
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ]

I agree non-commercial does close open source down a bit. And that free and
open are two different things.

However, early on in the open hardware definition writing, a couple artists
asked if there was a non-commercial aspect to the license because as
artists they were not going to make a profit off selling multiples, and
didn't want other people to either, but did want their design open to learn
from. So maybe there is a percentage of people who do want that type of
option in some form of open hardware.

Alicia
On May 9, 2012 2:29 PM, "Patrick Anderson" <agnuc...@gmail.com> wrote:

The first non-commercial open hardware licenses can be open source,
but with the license produced in a largely commercial environment, its
free distribution is limited to the digital design, until enough
volunteers, donations, and materials/parts suppliers and package
delivery service partnerships realize the benefits of free material
transfer to make a free product. Such a license presents an amazing
challenge: to require people and organisations to give and receive
freely in the physical form. This warrants the need for suppliers to
form 'gift contracts' with developers dependent on various materials
or parts. This introduces the discussion of free and open logistics
necessary for development and delivery of products under
non-commercial open hardware licenses.

Open hardware licenses that promise a 'labor-only price' may come
before non-commercial licenses take off. All materials in a
'labor-only license' are donated, including solar power equipment to
run lights and power tools, the space or land, donated or squatted.
Even though developers in this scenario ask a price, this 'rough
libertarian' method is also a radical idea, because repair or
replacement of tools, the donation of solar power to run the facility,
and so on, would need free maintenance or development. For items or
services not donated, a crowd-source campaign is initiated, and people
donate because the product costs less or is better than others.

Proper online social network design, affordable high resolution
cameras and sensors, and autonomous production and delivery robots and
related technologies will all work to make non-commercial licenses,
not only feasible, but more efficient than commercial practices.

The first legitimately non-commercial product makes a gift contract
with the promise to send materials or parts to the developer that
assembles the final product for free, except delivery cost. The
developer here pays the shipping price and so must the user. This
calls for a 'non-commercial product with commercial delivery' license.
A non-commercial product of this type would have a price, but the user
paying the delivery charge for the product would only pay the
aggregated per unit cost of delivered parts assembled as a product,
including the price to ship the product to the user. If the developer
purchases delivery in bulk from gift contract partners, the price for
the user is reduced.

The next and final stage of the non-commercial license forms a gift
partnership with a package delivery service for free delivery. This
means a non-commercial license with the result of free acquisition by
the user. The shipping agent knows the product is free, so a gift
contract is formed for free product delivery. At first the price of
delivery will likely be subsided by the delivery agent. It is directly
beneficial for the package delivery service to form this partnership
if the gift partnership is with organizations that develop vehicles
and other hardware specifically needed for package delivery. Following
this logic, the first zero price non-commercial open hardware products
will likely deliver themselves.

At least one issue remains: for partners that give materials freely,
but not benefit from products made from donated materials, how can the
partner maintain the operation without money? One answer would be to
increase the scale of the Occupy! movement and go beyond free food and
shelter of the occupied site, expanded to spaces that freely meet
life's needs and legitimate comforts. Second, the legalization and
mass production or mass localisation of small workshops producing
autonomous vehicles dissolve the paid transport barrier, granted
materials are given to maintain infrastructures for free delivery. At
the moment driverless cars are only legal in Nevada and must have a
driver at the wheel, but if the Google Car and others continue to
drive without causing collision, it looks as if autonomous vehicles
without a driver could be legal by 2020. This date anticipates a
policy progression of: 2014, a minimally distracted driver; 2016, a
mostly distracted driver; 2018, a distracted driver; 2020, no driver
required. If my rough descriptions of Automated Distribution Systems
are acted on now, designed and tested, by 2025 we could feasibly have
a variety of newly produced zero priced products floating around (by
multicoper!).

Automated Distribution Systems
http://p2pfoundation.net/Automated_Distribution_Systems

Best.
Nathan