Re: [Open Manufacturing] Possibility for licensing/GPL for hardware [GOSH] (was: Electronics datasheet corpus? AND...)
Christian Siefkes
> > if your skdb-get format is capable of generating manufacturing code
> > (G-code or STLs, etc.) that is used in the RAM of a CAD/CAM setup when
[...]
> > parts are created, or even in the RAM of a web server or client
> > computer in the creation of a shopping cart of parts, wouldn't the
> > copyleft provisions of the GPL and copyright apply? In other words, in
>
> To be honest, I don't know. The main licensing issue that people worry
> about here is "what if some big company steals my designs and makes a
> million of the parts without a nod to me". For now we've been
> licensing all SKDB packages as GPL 2+. People on thingiverse, ponoko,
> shapeways seem to be licensing their designs as CC SA 3. The real
> trick is whether or not the licensing will hold up in the court of law
> (if it ever has to). I'd be interested in talking with someone from
> the EFF on this in the near future.
In general, the answer seems to be: NO, it's NOT possible to get copyleft
that applies whenever somebody builds, distributions, or sells hardware.
I've written a detailed article on that issue: 'The Tricky Business of
"Copylefting" Hardware'
<http://www.keimform.de/2009/12/09/the-tricky-business-of-copylefting-hardware/>
You may also be interested in the comments by Juergen Neumann re an idea of
GOSH people to resolve this issue--so far I'm not convinced that it would
work too well.
> > your quest to make dealing with hardware as easy as software through
> > format, have you opened the door for copyleft protection of
> hardware?
>
> Maybe.. let's seek advice from the EFF peeps.
I doubt it--it seems that there just is no good way of copylefting hardware
that works within the current legal framework. But I'm always interested in
new insights and bright ideas...
Best regards
Christian
--
|------- Dr. Christian Siefkes ------- chri...@siefkes.net -------
| Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
| Peer Production Everywhere: http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|---------------------------------- OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
If the meanings of "true" and "false" were switched, then this sentence
would not be false.
John Griessen
> Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
The main licensing issue that people worry
>> about here is "what if some big company steals my designs and makes a
>> million of the parts without a nod to me".
The physical parts would be fully legal to sell, but not the documentation
that made them.
The TAPR license is useful because it prohibits anyone using the licensed documentation
and creating a derivative work suing the licensor for patent infringement, even if they
have a valid patent. That is a hurdle to taking your open design proprietary, not a stopper.
The creator of a derivative work could obtain a patent on
improvements to the initial TAPR OHL design. They could make and sell physical product,
but not redistribute the docs without the TAPR terms -- they would have to rewrite their
own -- another hurdle.
The real
>> trick is whether or not the licensing will hold up in the court of law
>> (if it ever has to). I'd be interested in talking with someone from
>> the EFF on this in the near future.
>
> In general, the answer seems to be: NO, it's NOT possible to get copyleft
> that applies whenever somebody builds, distributions, or sells hardware.
> I've written a detailed article on that issue: 'The Tricky Business of
> "Copylefting" Hardware'
> <http://www.keimform.de/2009/12/09/the-tricky-business-of-copylefting-hardware/>
An Open hardware license and copylefted docs help keep your design available
and in the case of TAPR even return improvements to the community.
Attempting to stop anyone's production of hardware separate from the documentation
is a patent law action -- not possible with any other method. I think TAPR is
useful without owning your own patents as a deterrent since it gives others a
reason to document prior art that could bust a patent.
I disagree with the above
author about the usefulness of sending along all past versions and his complaint
about being impractical printing large version histories. Open hardware is such a new
concept there are no large version histories and paper is not sufficient for the data
to efficiently manufacture things these days. Data in standard formats can
easily become unwieldy if printed, but is perfectly usable on machine readable media.
For instance, why print a long logic test data stream? It's never read by humans
except to tweak code parts and that can't be done with pencil and paper. TAPR
was written with the help of an attorney and is the only GPL-like Open hardware license
and deserves a careful reading.
John Griessen
is
Eric Hunting
I see several key convergent trends that point toward a post-scaricity situation that's not rooted in just personal industrial technology but rather in the emergence of a Post-Industrial culture combined with a highly automated resource-based (rather than cash-based) global economy. What Open Manufacturing is doing is on the bleeding-edge of a general tend in industrial automation for progressively increasing productivity and production flexibility (mass customization/demand-driven flex production) with systems of decreasing scale and up-front cost. At the same time the economics of manufacturing has used-up the potential of Globalization as a means to exploit geographic spot-market bargains in materials and labor costs and is now dealing in a world of increasingly homogenous materials costs and expensive energy -and therefore transportation- costs. The efficiency of manufacturing logistics really matters now. It no longer makes economic sense to manufacture whole goods in far away places no matter how cheap the labor is. And -though the executive class remains slow on the uptake as usual- the trend is toward localization of production with increasing flexibility. So, ironically driven by the profit motive, commercial manufacturing is on a parallel track to the same goal as Open Manufacturing; progressive localization and diversification of production.
I foresee this producing a progressive 'commoditization' of global economics. In other words, global trade will increasingly be trade of commodities materials and components, because it no longer makes economic sense to move finished goods around when their transportation is so inefficient. Commodities trade is highly automated because commodities production is highly automated, produces uniform products, and deals in large volumes relative to the number of workers. Production costs are highly quantifiable when the amortized cost of equipment supersedes the human labor overhead and that tends to factor out the variability in that only remaining (and deliberately) 'fuzzy' valued commodity. The result is that there is increasing global price capitulation in the value of commodities -largely because its increasingly difficult to hide costs, find exclusive geographical spot-market bargains, or maintain exclusive distribution hegemonies. Trading systems have a very high and steadily increasing quantitative awareness of the costs of everything and the projected demand and production capacity for everything. At a certain point they can algorithmically factor out profit and can start trading commodities for commodities without cash indexed to projected demand/production. (profit in trade is based on divergence in the perception of value between buyer and seller. Scarcity is often a perception created by hiding data -and that's increasingly hard to do in a world where quantitative analysis trading knows more about an industry than the CEOs do. When everybody knows ahead of time what the concrete values of everything is and you have an actual open market where everyone has alternate sources for just about everything, profit becomes impossible. The more automated trade becomes, the closer we get this this point as production costs become more quantifiable through automation and computer based quantitative analysis becomes increasingly good at cost, demand, and production deduction) This is what I call a resource-based economy; an economy where resources are traded directly for resources and value-indexed to their demand. This is why I suggest that Jacque Fresco's Cybernation begins not with some giant 'electronic brain' sitting somewhere but, rather, in automated commodities trading networks that evolve so much integral quantitative analysis they just come to know the way the world works -on the numbers- very well and can logically arrive at a model for a basic subsistence overhead for everyone with a sustainable environmental impact derived from very broad/deep demand/production projection.
Of course, a lot of people don't want to wait for this eventuality. They want to force an end-run to this state through an intentional shift in culture and with engineered systems of alternative resource and goods production. And that's just fine because all such efforts only accelerate this process and make the transition to a resource based economy easier/less traumatic. We don't have the means to self-sufficiency on a personal level but we are approaching this capability for intentional community groups of modest and slowly shrinking scale. In these community environments it becomes possible to demonstrate some of the lifestyle benefits that this evolution of production and economics can produce. And independent production doesn't need to be fully comprehensive to have an impact on the larger economics. It can have big impact near-term on some key staples, like housing and food.
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
On Jan 6, 2010, at 4:38 AM, openmanufact...@googlegroups.com wrote:
> Roadmap to Post-Scarcity
> Heath Matlock <heathm...@gmail.com> Jan 05 07:24PM -0600 ^
>
> How is post-scarcity going to take place? What are the enabling technologies,
> and what can be expected from them? Factor-e-Farms and hackerpaces may
> help in reducing costs of goods for certain items, perhaps increasing
> the standard of living. Certainly those on these farms may be the
> firsts to realize self-sufficient living, but what about the
> surrounding town and cities? What kind of output can be expected per
> acre of farming? What is needed to accommodate small, medium, and
> large cities?
>
> I figure hydroponics' popularity will continue growing in cities, but
> again how much is needed for people to provide their food needs. Maybe
> there will be some who accommodate all their food energy needs, but
> I'm also guessing some will only make enough to accommodate a meal or
> two. What are the energy requirements for these gardens?
>
> Can we realistically rely on pop culture to adopt a farming/gardening
> lifestyle? This is where the idea of a molecular assemblers become
> appealing, because I don't think anyone would be opposed to have a
> magic box which produces their food, clothing, housing, and the rest
> of their needs.
>
> What other technologies can we expect to raise the standard of living
> and reduce time from mundane tasks so citizens' can pursue their
> interests more freely, and thus hopefully causing a more productive
> civilization? What is needed to adopt and implement these
> technologies? What are the energy requirements? This is a thread meant
> to give clarity as we move forward, hopefully alert and not oblivious
> to flaws in perceived flawless logic. So please chime in. :-)
>
> Paul has already mentioned flexible manufacturing:
>
> """
> So, there are at least five different related (and
> overlapping) paths to flexible manufacturing:
> * humanoid robots using manipulator-held tools
> * An ecosystem of Cubespawn cubes
> * Dedicated flexible manufacturing machines doing machinging
> * generalized 3D printing
> * Humans following instructions from the web using hand tools and less
> """
>
>
> --
> Heath Matlock
> +1 256 274 4225
>
Paul D. Fernhout
is that much cheaper to ship commodities around than finished goods,
especially if there is wasted material in production. It may go either way
depending on the goods and how they are packed, I would guess.
I see more some other factors, in responding to your thought provoking comments.
Producing and recycling locally saves transportation costs and the costs of
coordination. If energy for transportation is cheap, and coordination is
easy, and there are no other external costs (but there always were, but they
were ignored), then it may make sense to move a lot of stuff around if you
don't know how to do it better locally.
Now, as fiat dollar costs rise, or as people realize the external costs
(pollution, political) they are paying are huge (a trillion dollars US every
year for defense of oil supplies), then there is an increased social energy
to try to make local solutions work with local labor or local automation.
But, there are still all sorts of artificial scarcity roadblocks to
cooperation like monopoly issues (essentially, people trying to get rents
for access to land, other resources, or patents and copyrights and so on).
Still, even if you could do it locally, some other global reason may
prevent you financially (fiat dollars) or legally (by the police state
enforcing monopolies, what any libertarians rightfully go on about even as
they ignore some benefits of the state). These rent-seeking factors may be
monopoly powers in the market, like patents and copyrights or trademarks or
other brand awareness issues. Or these monopoly powers may be special access
to cheap land or other resources by historical ownership claims (either from
past military conquest, or by getting there first, or by trading with people
who did one of the first two). These rent-seeking factors are probably will
become more and more the dominant aspect of the cost of mainstream economic
fiat dollar production as more and more work is automated or designed out of
existence. People with no jobs and with no capital will be unable to pay for
conventionally manufactured goods, and their labor will be worthless. Still,
as people have pointed out here (you?) if things are cheap, it may be cheap
to buy a means of production like a 3D printer and makes stuff yourself. But
this still assumes access to land (which may be unaffordable anywhere the
market dysfunction is spreading).
However, I agree with your larger analysis about a convergence of what is
economic if energy for transportation is perceived to be expensive and the
aspect of open manufacturing that is about local production. Still, the
market is fickle in that way. If transportation gets "cheaper" with external
costs paid by others, the market will go back to lots of transportation. So,
it is not all about impatience, some of it is just about not trusting the
bigger economy to account for external costs, or for it to every be willing
to rethink the rent structure for people who have already gotten preferred
positions in rent-seeking. I've heard it said (sorry don't have reference)
that a democracy can get hardening of the arteries over time (a variation on
"the tree of liberty must be refreshed..." quote). And that is a bit what we
have seen in US society -- a hardening of the arteries, a loss of social
mobility, a stagnation and freezing of the system. That aspect of things is
really the biggest one in many ways. There are (guessing) millions of
engineers in the USA alone, and a lot more globally. In one year these
engineers could do amazing open manufacturing things. The fact that they
don't, and are making often faddish or redundant things, has almost
everything to do with our social organization and our history.
I don't see local production as the biggest important ideal in itself
anymore. It has benefits, like local control, security, and efficiency
sometimes, but there is still value in a network (or a meshworks/hierarchies
balance). I think the bigger ideals are the social ideals of cooperation,
sharing, openness, an abundance mindset (instead of a scarcity mindset), a
focus on human and biospheric health, and related ideas. And, we need a
technosphere that reflects those values. It's a bit of a chicken-egg thing,
but we are still getting there in the bits and pieces of time people have to
contribute for various reasons (hobby, retired, momentary run of spare time,
unemployment, etc.).
To date, much technology has been organized through motives of competition
and scarcity, and that has caused the infrastructure to be built in a
certain way (toll booths on highways, online services set to bring financial
gain, DRM in CPUs, even the placement of roads and houses as suburbs near
cities). Essentially, it is not the "best" ideas for people but the ones
that can be "best defended profitably" that have become commonplace. So, we
see drug representatives pushing antidepressants instead of vitamin D which
might do a better job, or pushing cancer treatment drugs rather than
prevention again with vitamin D. And almost the research goes into fancy
drugs, not plain things like vitamin D. And we see cell phone companies
building incompatible infrastructures. And we see software vendors and
hardware vendors creating incompatible standards to try to win some
competition. And we see schooling and media and government all locked into
supporting this whole system.
I don't really know what a technology or infrastructure that was designed
for a post-scarcity world might look like for sure, along with its social
systems. James P. Hogan, Theodore Sturgeon (The Skills of Xanadu), Iain
Banks, and others have tried to envision it. I can imagine some basic things
like in-vitro meat could be important (or something else, since
vegetarianism works. :-) For one thing, I can think schooling as we know it
will be history. In some ways, schooling is both the easiest and the hardest
thing to change about all this -- hard to change what is there, but easy to
make new tools to educate people in how to make their own stuff and take
back control of areas of their own life. Again, the openness aspect. We
can't have a post-scarcity society unless we have a lot of post-scarcity
citizens, and that takes a lot of education (and very little schooling).
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
Eugen Leitl
> I think we are talking about a convergence of technology, cultural shifts, and economic factors rather than any particular pivotal technology. Though there is often a focus in the open manufacturing community on technologically enabling individual self-sufficiency as a means to achieving post-scarcity, that comprehensive production capability is a long-way off and will have to achieve a very advanced state -in recycling more than production- to cope with the non-homogeniety of many important materials resources.
Holy wall of text, Batman!
> I see several key convergent trends that point toward a post-scaricity situation that's not rooted in just personal industrial technology but rather in the emergence of a Post-Industrial culture combined with a highly automated resource-based (rather than cash-based) global economy. What Open Manufacturing is doing is on the bleeding-edge of a general tend in industrial automation for progressively increasing productivity and production flexibility (mass customization/demand-driven flex production) with systems of decreasing scale and up-front cost. At the same time the economics of manufacturing has used-up the potential of Globalization as a means to exploit geographic spot-market bargains in materials and labor costs and is now dealing in a world of increasingly homogenous materials costs and expensive energy -and therefore transportation- costs. The efficiency of manufacturing logistics really matters now. It no longer makes economic sense to manufacture whole goods in far away places no matter how cheap the labor is. And -though the executive class remains slow on the uptake as usual- the trend is toward localization of production with increasing flexibility. So, ironically driven by the profit motive, commercial manufacturing is on a parallel track to the same goal as Open Manufacturing; progressive localization and diversification of production.
>
> I foresee this producing a progressive 'commoditization' of global economics. In other words, global trade will increasingly be trade of commodities materials and components, because it no longer makes economic sense to move finished goods around when their transportation is so inefficient. Commodities trade is highly automated because commodities production is highly automated, produces uniform products, and deals in large volumes relative to the number of workers. Production costs are highly quantifiable when the amortized cost of equipment supersedes the human labor overhead and that tends to factor out the variability in that only remaining (and deliberately) 'fuzzy' valued commodity. The result is that there is increasing global price capitulation in the value of commodities -largely because its increasingly difficult to hide costs, find exclusive geographical spot-market bargains, or maintain exclusive distribution hegemonies. Trading systems have a very high and steadily increasing quantitative awareness of the costs of everything and the projected demand and production capacity for everything. At a certain point they can algorithmically factor out profit and can start trading commodities for commodities without cash indexed to projected demand/production. (profit in trade is based on divergence in the perception of value between buyer and seller. Scarcity is often a perception created by hiding data -and that's increasingly hard to do in a world where quantitative analysis trading knows more about an industry than the CEOs do. When everybody knows ahead of time what the concrete values of everything is and you have an actual open market where everyone has alternate sources for just about everything, profit becomes impossible. The more automated trade becomes, the closer we get this this point as production costs become more quantifiable through automation and computer based quantitative analysis becomes increasingly good at cost, demand, and production deduction) This is what I call a resource-based economy; an economy where resources are traded directly for resources and value-indexed to their demand. This is why I suggest that Jacque Fresco's Cybernation begins not with some giant 'electronic brain' sitting somewhere but, rather, in automated commodities trading networks that evolve so much integral quantitative analysis they just come to know the way the world works -on the numbers- very well and can logically arrive at a model for a basic subsistence overhead for everyone with a sustainable environmental impact derived from very broad/deep demand/production projection.
>
> Of course, a lot of people don't want to wait for this eventuality. They want to force an end-run to this state through an intentional shift in culture and with engineered systems of alternative resource and goods production. And that's just fine because all such efforts only accelerate this process and make the transition to a resource based economy easier/less traumatic. We don't have the means to self-sufficiency on a personal level but we are approaching this capability for intentional community groups of modest and slowly shrinking scale. In these community environments it becomes possible to demonstrate some of the lifestyle benefits that this evolution of production and economics can produce. And independent production doesn't need to be fully comprehensive to have an impact on the larger economics. It can have big impact near-term on some key staples, like housing and food.
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
John Griessen
> I don't see local production as the biggest important ideal in itself
> anymore. It has benefits, like local control, security, and efficiency
> sometimes, but there is still value in a network (or a
> meshworks/hierarchies balance). I think the bigger ideals are the social
> ideals of cooperation, sharing, openness, an abundance mindset (instead
> of a scarcity mindset), a focus on human and biospheric health, and
> related ideas. And, we need a technosphere that reflects those values.
> It's a bit of a chicken-egg thing, but we are still getting there in the
> bits and pieces of time people have to contribute for various reasons
> (hobby, retired, momentary run of spare time, unemployment, etc.).
Yep. That's what motivates me, not being a "global society planner or revolutionary".
John Griessen
Kozuch
works within the current legal framework."
What are you talking about? Do we need any "legal" framework at all?
What does hold you from creating a (very) custom legal "contract" (it
would actually be something like EULA) that specifies literally
anything you wish???
Christian Siefkes
I don't know why this shows up here under the subject header "Roadmap to
Post-Scarcity", but as I just wrote at
http://www.keimform.de/2009/12/09/the-tricky-business-of-copylefting-hardware/#comment-17523
: I mentioned in my comment to Juergen that a shrink-wrap (or click-wrap)
license *might* work, but I think it would be very difficult to get
something that is internationally watertight. For example, in German law,
click-wrap licenses which the user accepts when s/he installs the software
(rather then when they bought it) are not valid at all, and even when the
user accepts at buy, there are many things that *cannot* be agreed on in a
EULA at all (the respective clauses will be invalid and can be ignored --
cf. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endbenutzer-Lizenzvertrag). How does this
translate to free hardware where there is no "buying" at all? And would it
be possible to define a copyleft-like click-wrap agreement that was valid
in German law? I don't know...
And that's just *one* jurisdiction--imagine the difficulties of writing an
agreement that holds up in the major North American and European
jurisdictions at least. Even the big companies with their huge legal
divisions fail at that tasks (their EULAs are regularly invalid in some
parts)...
Another issue is the passing on of information--whoever spreads such
"click-wrapped" free information, would have the burden of making the other
party accept the click-wrap agreement as well. What if I spread the
information ignoring this requirement? Clearly *I* have violated the
license terms, but what about the person I gave it too? They don't have
violated anything, but they have got the information and can probably use
it in any way they like (without being bound by the license which they
didn't accept).
Best regards
Christian
--
|------- Dr. Christian Siefkes ------- chri...@siefkes.net -------
| Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
| Peer Production Everywhere: http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|---------------------------------- OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
What chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity. We have to
be careful to conserve it...
-- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, Peopleware