First of all, thanks much for your replies. Well, you didn't misunderstand what I was asking. But your answers were not so obvious to me. I'd like to share some thoughts of my own.
For the sake of brevity, in the following, when I refer to software I mean open source, when I say "free" I mean the legendary "as in beer". My reasons for asking are not just academic, I rather envision a new hardware project that would be not for profit-but I wouldn't want to burden you with the details, at least for now. However, the modular approach that Daniel referred to gives some thoughts on how your project and the one I have in mind could benefit from each other, but I'd like to elaborate on this later, if it's not a problem. The main problem with my plan lies with the cost of materials needed to get this through. And, of course, the development costs. If this was strictly a software effort, the first problem would not exist.And the second would just boil down to gathering volunteers for yet another software project. So I was wondering what it is that makes software projects different than hardware projects cost-wise, and whether the differences could be accounted for. If you think about it, software projects aren't actually free. Someone's got to pay for the computing equipment and the Internet connections that are needed in order to make software a reality.But you have software volunteers regardless, and in many cases no price is put on the actual software product. On the contrary, I don't think that anyone would give away the actual hardware that they've built, and it would even sound absurd to ask someone to do so. And I'm not saying that this is not logical or that it's bad in any way, but I keep wondering. If these assumptions are not wrong, and based on what I've read so far, I think that this is an issue of the difference of the perceived costs between hardware and software. In the case of software, non-material incentives (experience gain, collaboration, sense of freedom, pure creative joy) would outweigh the development cost for a volunteer. So, the first free software communities were based on these incentives.But for a hardware developer, maybe the material costs clearly outweigh such non-material incentives. I'm not a hardware developer myself (at least not yet), that's another reason why your opinions could be of great help to me. On Aug 18, 2011 3:48 PM, "Timothy Normand Miller" <[email protected]> wrote:
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