I'm firmly convinced that if a Chinese maker made a 100% open source keyboard or mouse, they could sell that for $30 instead of $3, and establish a global brand to boot.
Same thing for a lot of hardware, actually. Printers. Scanners. Etc.
Same thing for a lot of hardware, actually. Printers. Scanners. Etc.
An open source soldering iron, original by a Chinese company Miniware. I don't know how good their sales are, but the iron is so good it got that Louis Rossmann praised it (for the price, ofc). And it seems to be very popular (probably not nearly as much as Weller, but hey).
Since i can't edit, reply.
Oh, and i seem to have underestimated Louis's recommendation. He likes it a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao39bPEyok4
On the topic of open source for hardware; There's an open source software for Hantek oscilloscopes http://openhantek.org/ (not official) , which is yet another thing i'l have to get myself some day.
The hardware is fully supported by the OpenWRT project, so installing plain OpenWRT is easy.
But it’s still a relatively slow device (650 MHz MIPS 24Kc) with throughput well below 100 Mbps when encrypting. The faster GL-AR750S is still well below 100 Mbps when encrypting. That’s the tradeoff of a small and cheap device that can be powered by a USB 5V power adapter.
The more annoying part is that the 5 GHz WiFi has not been certified for DFS, and therefore DFS channels are disabled.
I also have a Linksys WRT1900ACS and it's a great piece of kit.
The point is that no matter the hardware, having the community-empowered OpenWRT at one's disposal is literally super-empowering.
Thank you the community. Thank you RMS.
Company is from Hong Kong.
What kind of modem do they have? Huawei?
Brand has value.
* Most mice on Aliexpress sell for $3 or so. I don't know the margin, but it's less than $3.
* I can't imaging anyone would hesitate to pay $5 more, and I wouldn't mind $30 more.
So yeah, off-brand could compete, and I'm sure students might buy it, but I think on-brand would do better.
And in either case, it wouldn't hurt. The $3 Aliexpress mouse vendors don't have any real IP moat. This is commodity tech.
Non-commercial open license, but the original author(s) would still retain full right including commercial.
Another interesting approach would be something like the GPL, which I don't think is often used in hardware. Allow your competitors to use your design ... they just must contribute back improvements. Probably the incentives are wrong for this, but maybe not, it sorta seems like a bunch of the "no-name" chinese consumer goods operate like this. The produces are easy enough to reverse engineer that every just copies the basic idea and produces their own variants. This of course doesn't keep the inventor in an advantaged position, but at least keeps them competitive.
I think what is a problem is that people can't use a subset of you design to make their own stuff. Maybe the solution to that is a common library of totally free design-pattern, but that still requires integration into a finished product?
> Allow your competitors to use your design ... they just must contribute back improvements.
won't this just lead to trivial improvements? perhaps a bug bounty, or similar, would be better? or even licensing the original design for either a set fee, or a %?
If you want an ecosystem, you need an ecosystem license. "Open" source has never worked for anyone that I know of, not for lack of trying.
There are plenty open drivers for proprietry hardware too.
It's working on their brand - but isn't selling for a 10X price premium.
It uses http://marlinfw.org/ with only modifications to the configuration (which, you need to do for any printer using Marlin). But the above link also includes the PCB design, mechanical design, and more.
The whole 3D printing community is a lot like this. See http://vorondesign.com/, an open set of design you can build yourself from off the shelf parts and a quality 3D printer.