13 Open Source Hardware Companies Make $1+ Million 149
kkleiner writes "Selling products whose design anyone can access, edit, or use on their own is pretty crazy. It's also good business. At the annual hacker conference Foo Camp East this year, Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried from Adafruit Industries gave a rapid fire five-minute presentation on thirteen companies with million+ dollar revenues from open source hardware. The thirteen add up to $50 million this year. While this business model is counter-intuitive for those accustomed to our current patent- and copyright-encrusted system, Torrone and Fried estimate that the industry will reach a billion dollars by 2015."
$1M revenue is not "making a million" (Score:5, Informative)
In the world of hardware there is an enormous difference between the two. You can easily have $1M in revenue and lose your shirt (make a huge loss).
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Don't apply sound business techniques to the open source discussion.
That said, what book or books represent the definitive "this is the open source model"?
1 Simple way to become a millionaire with FOSS (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't apply sound business techniques to the open source discussion.
Doesn't matter, the open source model only shines when there's an extremely small barrier to entry. Not many users will build their own factory to patch a chip, I'd imagine.
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Agreed. That's why the comment "Selling products whose design anyone can access, edit, or use on their own is pretty crazy. " from TFA is retarded.
Of course it also uses "open source" to refer to something other than software, which is also retarded. Is it too much to ask people who are publishing poetry or marmalade recipes to find some other buzzphrase?
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Most hardver is specified using Verilog or VHDL, so there isn't such big difference between hardware and software.
'cept you've got to put the result of synthesis/fitting into an FPGA, and that FPGA needs to go on a PCB, and you need a power supply, and the other things that make the design interesting (display, user interface, enclosure, etc). Oh, and you've got to get PCBs fabbed and stuffed, which means a significant upfront expense, something that software folks don't have to consider.
Oh, yeah, if there's a bug in that PCB artwork, or even in the FPGA design, once it's in the customer's hands, fixes are difficult an
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I'm not sure anyone is disputing if Verilog or VHDL would be source code but you still need CAD files of the actual board etch patterns and all the other physical parts which are not generally worked with as code. I think the point Hognoxious is making is that why keep calling everything 'source' to force it under the known term 'open source'? Just call it what it is, 'open hardware design' or whatever other term you want to apply the word 'open' to. I'm not sure about the marmalade recipe though, that might be plausible to fit under source code as it might class as a type of script...
Some of the "open source hardware" folks think that releasing a tarball of poorly-designed/documented VHDL, a PDF of a schematic and some Gerber plots is good enough. Of course you also need a bill-of-materials, a way of getting boards built (expensive) and stuffed (expensive).
(Yes, I've looked at a lot of the open-source hardware, especially on opencores.org, and the majority of it is not ready for production use. Sorry. Lots of the code is of first-year student quality and the documentation and design sup
No kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
My parents do about $750,000, maybe more, in sales per year in their small business. However they still aren't making a profit. Their expenses are eating it all up. They aren't millionaires and will never become ones this way, despite having sales near a million a year. Business isn't cheap to do. Whatever you think a business should be getting in profits, you have to figure their revenues have to be at least double that, usually much more. For example GE has $154 BILLION in revenues, yet makes only $10 Billion in terms of income available to common.
Doing a million in sales isn't hard. As I said, my parents near that and they have a small business that more or less sells just to a small tourist city in Canada. Making a million in profit, that's much harder.
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
For example GE has $154 BILLION in revenues, yet makes only $10 Billion in terms of income available to common.
Well, yes. But lots and lots of employees at GE have very comfortable incomes. The company itself may only be making a particular margin, but when you consider the wealth of the employees, things change dramatically.
Re:$1M revenue is not "making a million" (Score:4, Funny)
Open Source (Score:1, Funny)
How much does proprietary software/hardware make? It's hard to examine, but it's probably more than $50 millions.
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AMD made $5.4 billion last year and Intel made around $35 billion. Each of these companies make more revenue in an hour than the yearly revenue of any of these companies.
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AMD made $5.4 billion last year and Intel made around $35 billion. Each of these companies make more revenue in an hour than the yearly revenue of any of these companies.
They also make more than most proprietary software/hardware companies.
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Even ARM, which is significantly smaller than either of those, makes $305 million in revenue. There's nothing impressive about making $1 million in revenue.
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Out of curiosity, I ran lspci and Google'd a few of the companies that showed up. Marvell had $2.81 billion last year. Ricoh was something like 21 billion. Everything else was large brands like Intel and nVidia.
I was surprised -- I would've thought ARM would be bigger relative to those.
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It is for a small start-up, and all these companies are start-ups that have not raised huge amounts of funding - so their ROI could still be pretty good.
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At much lower prices, and much of those prices go to the companies that actually produce them (ARM is an Intelectual Property company)
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Now if people would get the point of your statement, most of slashdot would have a heart attack and die.
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and how much did AMD or Intel make in their early years? Opensource hardware is relativity new.
The term is new. The idea of selling a user-built and modifiable kit is nothing new. Remember Heathkit?
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how much does open source software/hardware make? It's hard to examine, but it's probably more than 50 million.
way to go with a comment that proved nothing as it also qualifies in the opposite scenario, sopssa.
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So Open Source hardware is favoured by smaller, newer and more nimble companies, while proprietary systems are favoured by big monolitic industries.
Great deducting there Sherlock...
One MILLION? (Score:5, Funny)
You know, Dr. Evil, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over nine billion dollars a year!
It's dot com again (but it doesn't work anymore) (Score:5, Funny)
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Not rocket science. (Score:2)
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Of course, this works better if you only expect revenue from the sale of hardware units and don't rely heavily on revenue from providing some form of subscription service or software sales.
I believe this is a good thing. Hardware *should* be open. I long for the old days when we could come up with new ways to use our bare hardware.
Open source improves this not by "forcing" manufacturers to be open, but by lowe
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do you have an actual argument here or are you just ranting against open source concepts? Open source can use patented software if they so choose, first off. Second, even Microsoft declares themselves open source (even if obviously false), although they claim that the MS-PL is open source (and codeforge or whatever their version is called). Are you saying MS also uses tech from the cold war?
it'd sure explain plenty of things.
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Second, even Microsoft declares themselves open source (even if obviously false), although they claim that the MS-PL is open source (and codeforge or whatever their version is called).
0/10. Poor troll is poor.
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Well actually I was talking about saving money on per-seat runtime licenses, or not having to roll their own boot strap.
I never mentioned patents, since I thought it was pretty much obvious to anyone that just because they used open source tools and/or operating systems for their products, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can't use patented technology. Hence my comment about not forcing the manufacturer to be open.
However, this is rarely a problem with hardware manufacturers because they're in the bu
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Sure you do (especially for Bill_the_Engineer, not so much for Bill_the_Average_person_clueless_about_technology) but the question is will you bring more return in for your investors than with closed hardware. More to the point, can you convince your investors to pony up for R&D up front, while knowing that as soon as your product is out, $LARGE_CORP can copy it and sell it for less because it doesn't have
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Let me tell you about my experience with OSH ... I go download the plans, run to my local machine shop, machine the parts for my own CNC machine and cobble it together for half the price of the version I can 'buy'.
Then I proceed to use it to make other OSH projects.
The problem with OSH is that the people who give a shit about it being open are just going to build it themselves and not bother buying anything from you.
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Well evidently someone's making money. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a story to comment on...
The other side to this story is that the open-source hardware which is the basis of this story is little more than gadgetry. They are not products, they are just for a tiny hacker market who like shiny things they can play with.
Besides, why buy an Arduino board when I can buy a Silicon Labs development board for less money and get more features?
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The problem with OSH is that the people who give a shit about it being open are just going to build it themselves and not bother buying anything from you.
In some cases this is true. However, there are other factors that come into it.
I own a couple of arduinos. Even though I have the skills to build one and I suppose it would be a bit of fun to do so, I chose to buy them. Why? For me, the biggest limitation is time. I have so many crazy ideas, and there is so little time! I bought each of my arduinos for a specific project. I prefer to spend my limited time on the projects themselves rather than building an arduino. I can buy the parts for an arduin
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Lately i've been using the Ardweeny from solarbotics: http://www.solarbotics.com/products/kardw/ [solarbotics.com]
It's only 10$ and very quick to assemble. It felt wasteful using a full size arduino in a permanent project, so i moved to these. You just need an FTDI cable to do the programming.. it's just a special usb cable. Being able to shave 20$ off each of your projects is worth it. Not to mention the space savings. The only way to get cheaper/smaller is to use a naked chip (imo).
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Mine came from digikey, well actually spare parts I had that came from digikey ...
I originally planned to order 3 from sparkfun myself, but realizing the ones they had weren't really powerful enough for what I wanted and that I'd be far happier with one board instead of 3, I threw my together with spare parts I cobbled together.
I actually made the stepper controllers without using anyone elses reference design.
You're right though, I certainly was going to buy that component from sparkfun, but the software s
Re:Not rocket science, but not marketable, either. (Score:2)
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Of course, this works better if you only expect revenue from the sale of hardware units and don't rely heavily on revenue from providing some form of subscription service or software sales.
I believe this is a good thing. Hardware *should* be open. I long for the old days when we could come up with new ways to use our bare hardware.
The vast majority of users of consumer electronics DO NOT CARE about hacking the products they buy. Not at all. They just want the devices to work as indicated on the tin. Remember for every geek who wants to hack an iPod, there's a million people who just want to play songs. The open-hardware "market" is insignificant.
Open source improves this not by "forcing" manufacturers to be open, but by lowering the production costs and lessens the need to offset very large initial investments during the production run with secondary revenue streams.
Adding the capability for user programming increases costs. Using user-modifiable parts, which one might take to mean that instead of the smallest possible SMT, the design is implemented usin
Don't see the growth... (Score:3, Interesting)
Were you around way back when? (Score:2, Insightful)
Back in the day companies gave away reference designs for their new components, and companies often simply added software to these reference designs to specialize their products. The Tandy Color Computer was a chip-for-chip reference design created by Motorola. The Colecovision was a chip-for-chip reference design from Texas Instruments. These reference designs were zero-cost, modifiable and distributable.
How much different is a freely-distributable reference design schematic with open source DL? It isn't i
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Back in the day companies gave away reference designs for their new components, and companies often simply added software to these reference designs to specialize their products. The Tandy Color Computer was a chip-for-chip reference design created by Motorola. The Colecovision was a chip-for-chip reference design from Texas Instruments. These reference designs were zero-cost, modifiable and distributable.
How much different is a freely-distributable reference design schematic with open source DL? It isn't if you think of the chip as a circuit board in miniature and the OSS HDL as a code for a schematic. Of course, that users of the unprogrammed chips have to do the reference design themselves, rather than receiving it gratis from the manufacturers is beyond me...
Oh yeah, I forgot: monetize what was once free or stockholders get angry.
You seem to forget that back in the day, getting a PCB made for these products was a significant expense. Free (as in beer) schematic and PCB layout tools did not exist -- in fact, PCBs were designed by hand using rubylith. There were no quick-turn PCBs fabs like Advanced Circuits who'd take Gerbers and send back a handful of boards for $10 each in three days.
So while the electronics design was basically from the chip vendors, there was still a significant effort and expense in packaging. Don't forget that
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I don't really see the growth factor for open source hardware.
What? You mean corporate management teams aren't convinced by this article? Nintendo isn't considering open sourcing the Wii hardware and software and letting all their competitors undercut them with identical systems that will play the same titles? I'm shocked!
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The average person gets everything the programmers created, and mostly for free. That is quite different from a closed environment, that few programmers adopt and fewer yet will develop to. As Balmer once said, "Developpers, developpers, developpers!" (One can say that MS does know how to run a business.)
That's great and all (Score:4, Insightful)
That's great and all but how much profit are they making on that $50 million in revenue?
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Here's the problem: timmarhy is clearly partaking in some anti-open-source trolling in other posts in this article. But! That particular post by timmarhy raise a very valid point, in an asinine manner. This post by Lunix Nutcase raises the same point, in a cogent manner. It's still a good point!
Kind of like how even if Hitler says 2 + 2 = 4, that doesn't mean we have to find a different solution to 2 + 2. Sometimes, even the "bad guys" can be correct.
And the post rating he did? Responded to a clear a
Revenue vs. Profit (Score:2, Insightful)
The question is, can they pay their people, their suppliers, their advertisers, etc and then MAKE A PROFIT from that revenue? That's the hard part for ANY business.
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The exception is when it's a company we don't like. Then you're allowed to take the revenue figure totally out of context and shout "OMG heevul profitearing corpra$$$$hunz11One!!!". and get totally modded up.
a lot of patent encumbered products are like OSS (Score:5, Insightful)
RAM, blu-ray, LTO backup tapes, WiFi and others
in all cases many companies come together, pool their patents to create a standard and share the profits since every product sold puts money into the industry pool to be doled out to its members. The model even predates Linux, since that's how VCR's were sold. the profits go back into research that is pooled into another patent pool for the next generation product.
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the profits go back into research that is pooled into another patent pool for the next generation product.
...that is closely kept behind barriers to prevent any newcomer to trouble this cycle of profits with these pesky "innovations"
"counterintuitive for those accustomed..." (Score:1)
Open source has been called a 'virus' by the traditional copyright establishment.
It might be more accurately be called an alternate operating system, running concurrently, that the existing OS is recognizing as a virus.
And yes, that is a Voyager reference.
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No mention of Digium? (Score:4, Informative)
Their products are amazing. In case you are not familiar, Mark Spencer and crew are the guys behind Asterisk, the best PBX ever. Their hardware business is actually pretty big, and they also provide asterisk-related services, including training and support.
Considering that 20% of all PBXs in use are Asterisk-based, I thought it was worth mentioning it.
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That's not what open source hardware means.
Asterisk, which I agree is completely awesome, is just some open source software you can run on Linux, an open source operating system.
Open source hardware would be a router in which you can modify the firmware (software) to suit your need
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I was not referring to the telephony cards, but the base system itself. Motherboards, processors, etc.
Digium is a perfect example except for one thing (Score:5, Informative)
Their hardware isn't open source.
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It's true, the hardware itself isn't exactly open right now, but it's an evolution over previously free hardware. That is, the Zapata project was extensively funded by Digium, and Zapata hardware was openly published. Today, Digium hardware isn't open, but all the specs are and so are the drivers. So, it's trivial to develop compatible hardware. There are actually several companies that produce and sell compatible hardware, like Sangoma. Mark wrote several important Free Software, including Asterisk and Gai
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I don't dispute that they use "free" software, just not hardware. Their primary business model is to sell interface cards or turnkey systems. That's why they purchased Switchvox a few years ago.
These are NOT big numbers. (Score:2)
A billion dollars is not a big number, and not really worthy of tooting ones horn over. Are you kidding me? And 50 million dollars for an industry isn't even enough to launch a magazine over. Wow.
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A billion dollars is not a big number, and not really worthy of tooting ones horn over. Are you kidding me? And 50 million dollars for an industry isn't even enough to launch a magazine over. Wow.
Yep. Sure isn't. [makezine.com] (and yes, I know this is not quite what you meant. I couldn't resist!)
and I think that everyone here is missing the point. It's not "wow, $50 million? that's a big industry!" It's more "wow, $50 million? OS hardware is growing fast from the ~$0 from about 5 years ago." And FYI, SparkFun Electronics [sparkfun.com], one of the companies listed, makes more than $10 million in annual revenue, which is some serious growth for one company in a new field. Couple that with sheer awesome, and you get a powerful c
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Quick - SUE THEM! (Score:2)
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For what? For 1 Mil? You are funny!
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Search for "submarine patent". There are plenty of examples.
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And your statement is so off that it's not even wrong. It's not a question of whether software patents are or aren't important - it's whether they should be allowed under patent law - and they weren't until the USPTO screwed up. Same with patenting "business methods".
Softw
Some perspective on size (Score:2)
Just for a little perspective - a $1M revenue company is a teeny-tiny company. We're talking mom and pop stores in a strip mall here. $1M in revenue is not hard to achieve - in fact if you don't care about profits it is very easy to achieve. (A business selling $2 bills for $1 will have all the revenue they can handle but will also be incredibly unprofitable) When these companies make $1M in profits, I'll be significantly more impressed. If you ever look at magazines like Inc [inc.com] they will always quote re
So? (Score:2)
I've worked at companies with 3 employees and multi million dollar years that still went out of business. $1M/Year revenue isn't impressive unless you still live in the 50s
Heres a better example, I can give you a company with a nearly infinate revenue stream.
Put out a 'bill changer' machine. It takes $20s and gives back $50s.
I promise you as long as I can fill it with $50s, no one one the planet will have higher revenues than me. Of course that doesn't mean the business is viable, but it WILL have kick a
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While the concept is legitimate, your machine would have to spit out 250 bills/second to equal WalMart's revenue ($400B)
Exchange rate (Score:2)
Put out a 'bill changer' machine. It takes $20s and gives back $50s.
Whether or not that's profitable depends on which countries' dollars your machine handles. I wonder if any company has tried vending machine-style foreign currency exchange.
Why $1B in 2015?? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Growing from $50m to $1B in five years would mean that the market for open sources increases twentyfold in just five years. OSS has been around since the 80ies, OSS companies have been around since the nineties. So it took 15 years for the market to grow to $50m, why on earth should it increase twentyfold in just five measly years? Like many analysts, he is just making up numbers.
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How this might work (Score:2)
I can believe that just being able to prove that a company in fact created an open source hardware design-or made a major contribution to its design, is enough to garner it significant business.
One problem with closed source designs, is that you may be buying from a company where the original creators are all gone. Open source hardware can help contain that possibility.
Not counterintutive for anybody who is, well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not counterintutive for anybody who is, well... a little bit older. There. Said it. Now that that's out of the way, let us hearken to the days when TV sets had SCHEMATIC DIAGRAMS printed on the inside of the box. This was so that guys called "repair men" could actually fix these "valuable devices". Furthermore, while most consumers couldn't tell heads or tails from the schematics, they could at least unplug the tubes and take them to the drugstore and test them, to see if it was as simple as a worn-out tube.
No, I'm not that old. I was a little kid when all this was still going on, and even then it was fading fast. Still though, I have vivid memories of it all. It made quite an early impression on my budding geek mind.
If computer hardware gets back to that, it would be a welcome regression to the mean. Throughout most of history, you could generally understand most of the components in a device, or at least understand the relationships between the black boxes well enough to make repairs.
Anyway, the companies that made these "open source" devices throughout history did just fine. They prospered because most people don't have time to understand a schematic or source and integrate all the parts themselves. They'd rather pay somebody else to do that.
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The difference is that an individual couldn't really use the schematic to clone the TV. Even if you could locate all the same parts and put them together, it still might not work because of the tolerance of the analog parts. You had to tweak things to get it right.
You just can't compare the analog and digital worlds.
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The difference is that an individual couldn't really use the schematic to clone the TV
No, you couldn't use the schematic to fab a picture tube or any of the other "black box" components; but there's always that point where "in order to make a cake from scratch you have to reinvent the universe".
If you really had a craving for the circuit in a particular Zenith set, I bet you could have indeed cloned it from readily available components. I don't consider buying a picture tube from Zenith cheating.
I wager
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Tweaking Linux configuration options is a lot different than bending wires around. Wires break after repeated attempts, config files don't.
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This is actually still the way it works for many higher-value items. It's not always the manufacturer that offers the information, but sites like PowerBook Medic [powerbookmedic.com] give disassembly instructions and sell part so you can do simple repairs yourself. Some laptop keyboards can be replaced with just a pen knife!
The components are still modular, it's just the idea of what makes a component that's changed. Now it's an entire mainboard assembly with a transistor count in the billions, rather than a single tube.
Also, I
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They were that way because they could be. These days it just isn't useful or feasible. You still can get circuit diagrams and parts lists for some items, but generally there's no point. The reason is the complexity and density. ICs are a boon for electronics overall, but they are impossible to repair. If an IC dies, that's it, it's gone, you are screwed. Also the boards themselves are much harder to deal with. Surface mount electronics with extremely tiny spacing, multiple layers of traces, etc.
More or less
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As you said, the schematics were there so repair men could fix the box when it was (frequently) broken. They were not there so the repair man could make design changes. Many (most) of those schematics had the word 'patented' on them, which specifically meant you could NOT use the schematic to create a clone, or even to make modifications. They also had the word 'copyright' on them, which meant no making copies for anyone else. TV development was full of patent fights and lawsuits. It is in no way corre
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...which specifically meant you could NOT use the schematic (...) to make modifications."
Um...no. You could legally modify your TV at will, but the warranty would no longer apply. Possibly your insurance wouldn't cover you in case a faulty (modified) device burnt down the house, but there weren't legal restraints on what you could do with the device.
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Considering most early personal computers did include schematics, and various appendixes of technical information for expansion, including the original IBM PC XT.
( ref 1 [macintouch.com], IBM PC Technical Reference Manual [wikipedia.org], ref 2).
$$$ and Sense (Score:3, Insightful)
I gotta ask myself... (Score:5, Insightful)
...what in the HELL is with these comments? A lot of these people either seem to have their heads up their asses, or are just jerks.
Sure, a million bucks isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, and may not be huge by small business standards... But for fuck's sake people, we're talking about companies consisting of-- on average --just a couple of people. People JUST LIKE US. In fact, they ARE some of us! If YOU made a million dollars in a year, wouldn't it be a pretty big deal?
With the world economy in the toilet and still goin' round an' round, tiny companies like these making decent money selling open source gadgets and whatnot IS a big deal.
Yes, revenue isn't profit, as many have pointed out. But I'll bet you anything, these people are doing fine, which isn't exactly something we can all say, now is it? Sparkfun? Sure, they're not really tiny like the rest, they have facilities and staff and all that, but still... Wanna know how they're doing? They gave away $100,000 worth of free stuff a while back, and I'll bet everyone's still got their jobs and can afford to eat.
These are people just like us, and they're pioneering the new way to design, manufacture, and sell electronics. Opensource hardware is even going to change the consumer side of the equation. Making people smarter about the things they buy, and making the consumer take up a more participatory role. It's another step in the democratization of technology.
Here's hoping we bring up the next generation wanting to build and create more things than they buy off the shelf. And here's hoping my name will show up in a similar presentation in the not-too-distant future!
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If YOU made a million dollars in a year, wouldn't it be a pretty big deal?
Yeah, but if my business model left me making that same amount after 5 or 10 years, I wouldn't brag about it. Particularly if I had a product like Arduino, who makes some really sexy OSH development kits.
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Why? If you made a million a year for 10 years in a row, why wouldn't you be proud of it? (Assuming you did want to make money, to begin with.)
Ok, GE wouldn't want to buy you. So what?
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Proud isn't bragging.
I'd be proud of myself, yes, but, I wouldn't brag to the press about how profitable OSH development is. They would, yes, laugh at me.
OSH represents a niche market. If you can get your product into the embedded or repackaged as a final product, you're talking about the same niche, but in high volume. That's something to brag to the press about.
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Yes, revenue isn't profit, as many have pointed out. But I'll bet you anything, these people are doing fine, which isn't exactly something we can all say, now is it?
If you are making decent money, why not just say so?
Talk about hourly wages, salaries and benefits. Dividends. Profits. Return on investment. Access to credit.
These are people just like us, and they're pioneering the new way to design, manufacture, and sell electronics.
Is this the "new" way or simply the old way - "Popular Science" circa 1910,
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Re:I gotta ask myself... (Score:4, Interesting)
hi, i'm phil, from the video. it wasn't clear that the OSHW movement is making money? the title of presentation and the post has an actual number in it.
i work for adafruit and make magazine - i don't think it makes sense to scan in each company's tax returns, but generally speaking... most/all the companies listed are making money. decent money, many full time employees, benefits, bonuses, profit sharing - great ROI, access to credit and VC. keep in mind they were very kind to share any revenue numbers and over the last couple years there has been a recession, yet all these companies have thrived.
OSHW should be celebrated here on /. - it's a dream come true and many of the people doing it are following their dreams.
it's too bad many of the people here do not have any aspirations "making" anything besides trolly comments on /.
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A million dollars should be more than enough for anybody.
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Cheers for the democratization of tech
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Hear hear!
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Because 1 million in Revenue (sales) isn't a big deal. I have a cousin who owns a small restaurant which primarily sells hotdogs (yes hotdogs). His small business has ~1 million in sales annually but after expenses he's lucky to break even.
All this article seems to say is that if you do open source hardware, you can make as much as a small restaurant per year in revenue! Which really isn't so impressive. Now if they had a 1+ million profit I'd be more impressed.
These comments are missing the point (Score:2, Interesting)
Why is everyone comparing these OSH companies to huge international tech companies? These small upstarts aren't providing schematics for the next desktop CPU. They are simply selling kits and schematics for electronics/hacker/maker gadgets. This is the next evolution of Heathkits and Radio Shack's better days. These companies aren't really trying to compete with the giants of the tech industry. The purpose is to act as an enabler for tinkerers, hobbyists, and crafters.
After years of ignoring hobbyist e
If you REALLY wanna make a million dollars ... (Score:2)
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I think the days of unpaid individuals making a select few rich and/or famous through their efforts are coming to an end.
If open source software or hardware is going to be successful beyond today's offerings it's going to have to earn its own way.