The difference I see is that if you give away a copy of software that
you wrote or helped write, you still have infinite copies of said
software, as does everyone else on your team (and everyone you gave a
software copy to). This is not true for hardware. If you give away a
piece of hardware you designed (or just -have-), you have one fewer
pieces of hardware. Unlike hardware, software can be copied at
negligible cost. "We have no magic replicator machines on this planet
[for material objects]."
Now that's not saying people shouldn't give away blueprints (forgive me
if I'm using the wrong words here) of the hardware they designed, as
well as any other information that might be needed to use it to its
fullest capacity (driver, BIOS source?). That would be a good thing.
Then the cost to produce the hardware would be on the recipient. But as
things stand (as far as I understand) that cost would be very high if
all the user wants is just to produce one piece of hardware.
The modular idea makes me think, though. If a company or number of
companies would create parts (that are easier to hand assemble than a
board, resistors, caps, etc - say snapping a few wire connectors
together) then people could share their connection patterns "For an
awesomer hard drive, replace the default CompuTronic AltF4 Parallel
Connector Group with the following modules:" and users would only have
to buy the modules - hopefully a fairly low cost. But that would be
several steps back in the size department, even if it's a step forward
(an) other department(s). Human fingers are larger than purpose-built
robot manipulators+tools have to be, and the coordination of the average
user has to be taken into account, too. If you just made the modules
the minimum size you had to for humans to assemble them and stuffed as
much function in as possible so as not to waste space, you might as well
just make desktop computer parts. "For an awesomer computer, replace
the default Pentium 133MHz CPU with an AMD K6 166MHz CPU."
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.
-Matt
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