On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Ilias K. <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
If you're not-for-profit, then your revenue equals your costs. But you still have costs, and therefore you still need revenue. And for hardware duplication, the costs are very high. > > 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. Yes, but typically enthusiasts have those already, which they bought for other purposes and can continue to use for other purposes. You would only count the cost of your development machine if you bought it expressly and exclusively for the purpose of writing free software. But still, you only have to do it once in order to work on any number of free software projects. Even the bandwidth to upload is essentially free since most of us never hit our bandwidth caps. Once that's all over with, you can post your code on Sourceforge, and you're done. No more costs to you for an unlimited number of copies. With hardware, there is a recurring high cost for every instance of the device. So, while you have a point that there are some (nonrecurring) costs for hobbyist software development, the cost of software distribution is essentially zero compared to the cost of hardware distribution. > 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. You say it's absurd, but so far it seems like a logical consequence of what you're suggesting. > > 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. Perceived? Where could our perceptions be wrong? Hardware costs money to copy. Software does not. I think those perceptions may be very well grounded. > 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. So what you're saying is that both software and hardware have some marginal duplication costs, and you're wondering if the hardware duplication costs are small enough, then people wouldn't mind making copies of hardware and giving those copies away for free? This makes me wonder: - Do we have the same definition of 'hardware'? - Do we have the same concept of what it means to duplicate/manufacture hardware? - Why would anyone want to spend time manufacturing hardware just to give it away? - You still haven't answered where we would get the money for raw materials. (Software has no raw materials to speak of.) Also, I think you need to address Lars' points. Your suggestion doesn't make sense in practical OR abstract terms. It doesn't make an appropriate comparison between software and hardware, and it seems to want to get money out of nowhere. I really mean no disrespect. I would really like to understand where you're going with this and see if you have a useful point to make. But you haven't made it yet. So I have to ask: Are you trolling? -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
