- Can you license a board that everybody could make with a soldering iron and the parts? I don’t know anything about copyright law, but I don’t see the “uniqueness” in it. Maybe I am also stupid. Who knows.
- Can’t the guy who made those boards make them for you again? I know this is a step in between and I don’t know anything about the free market, but wouldn’t it be unfair to now cut the middleman out? I am just speaking without thinking about money now!
Bart’s board is MIT licensed. I don’t know how much your board is a derivative of that. But MIT is pretty permissive. It wouldn’t hurt to confirm your choice with Bart.
The advantage of open sourcing it is that your project can go farther than you can take it. If someone wants to pick it up and leave you out of it, they can. The project will live on.
Advantage two is that it tells the user that the board is editable. They can look closely at how it works and make their own modifications or additions. You are guaranteeing in writing that commitment to openness.
Advantage three is that you will make more friends. People like Bart Dring respect open source projects and will give you free support. It can be lonely to be proprietary. Open source is a community.
That said, you have to imagine yourself seeing someone else make your board and selling it for cheaper. Possibly even modified in a negative way. You need to be ok with that conclusion. What if it was BTT? What if it was a company you didn’t like as much?
Opening it with MIT is the easiest. But someone could take your board, edit it, include it in a CNC kit and sell it without ever divulging the modifications. That makes MIT very business friendly (in this case, the business is your competition).
GPL 2.0 would mean that any derivative projects would need to also be open source. There is a line somewhere where the derivative is different enough to be closed, but I don’t know where that is, and I bet it is hard to find. That actually makes some companies not want to copy the board. It also gives a stronger guarantee to your users and contributors that the project will remain editable. Companies like Dewalt will shy away from GPL stuff. Companies like creality won’t.
You should be able to separate the license from your trademark. If you got a trademark for “V1 Hot Stuff Board”, released the design with GPL, and someone made 200 copies to sell on ebay. They would have to remove your logos and call it something else (like Cold Things PCB). I’m not sure if that happens by default, or if you have to make it clear in the license that the logo and name isn’t OSS. That is how companies like firefox and ubuntu release source, but you can’t imitate them. So you get things like iceweasel and mint linux.
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Sorry I guess I should have clarified. What version of Open Source would you pick?
I think you clarified a lot there, Heffe. MIT is wide open, GPL feels like actual open source to me as to the share alike part but it does seem like I would be a bummer move not to have a giant company use the board because of GPL, so MIT seems better.
I have purposely left my trademarked logo off of it at this point.
I know I can never compete with any company at producing these things, I really don’t want to. I am confident I will get my R&D investment back and that is the only money part I am worried about. In the end the goal was to get a board well suited to us, for CNC, For Non-3D printers that is as inexpensive as it can be without compromise.
The other issue that has been brought up is support. If random companies make poor copies and people come here for support. I would hate for this to be a burden, although I think we could quickly narrow down specific manufactures that made poor copies (like the fake Mini-rambos with swapped stepper wires).
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That was why I asked about getting another company involved. If I work with them before public release, I have the best chance at controlling quality. Then we have a jump on the other board factories that could possibly churn poor copies of these out - - cough…mks…cough.
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Clarifying this.
Let’s talk about licensing this new board.
1- What open source license would you suggest and why?
2- Bring in an overseas company to produce and distribute to hopefully get ahead of poor quality manufactures and reduce international shipping costs?
3-The board has a name, how much of my own branding should it include, if any? Using any of my own branding could turn away other machine users.
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Branding it would mean that copies would have to change it. If someone came here for help, we would be able to say, “Is it the v1 hot stuff board, or a HSB off of alibaba?”. That is the biggest benefit to branding.
The Bart boards are MIT. I think that is probably a good starting position. Prusa uses GPL2, I think. But I am not sure if they released their new boards that way. Finding similar examples is where I would start.
I can’t tell you how to get a company to make them. I think you would know better than anyone. It would be a bit of a pain to have to wait for a company to send you 500 and then have 500 on your shelves at once. But you know that better than anyone. If BTT picked it up, and they ended up on amazon, that might make your life a lot easier, as long as it didn’t cut into your business too much.
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Digging around.
They are interested, I have not taken it any further yet.
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So Bart Creates this, and then releases it to you to find a manufacturer for it?
Whats in it for him then?
I definitely like the idea of having your logo on the board and using it to identify against “fakes” would make troubleshooting much easier.
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If you’re going to put your logo on it can I suggest you consider putting some other trap streets on the silk screen printing to detect fakes.
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More people using FluidNC?
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Bart has told me personally that he originally started designing the boards to make grbl_esp32 more popular. That was several years ago.
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I paid to have a very specific board made. I will be having it made currently at jlcpcb. From there I can choose to continue that, which includes importing and then exporting, or I can find an international partner that can distribute them for far less.
The designer is getting paid for his time, something new came out of this in hardware and software (free R&D), and the firmware will hopefully gain a wider following which in turn I assume will be more support in several forms and result in a more robust firmware.
Kinda defeats the purpose of the design being open source, I have seen that before and it felt in poor taste.
That doesn’t really work with open source pcb’s as you can just click my exact files and make an exact replica, from the exact company I will be initially sourcing them from. The issue would be if they chose poorly when replacing a component, or I guess just making the board poorly, any sort of redesign is not too much of a worry as those will be easy to spot. Part of the reason this will be less expensive though is simple readily available components (like all the V1 designs).
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I guess the other side of the coin on this is if I put my trademark on it I will be forcing people to alter the design before making it. That could result in other issues. If I make it one click clones then there is a better chance it will be a good experience for the end user no matter where they buy it from.
This is always the question with open source. What is the main goal, to have the words “open source” on your package, or to make it easy for anyone to do what they wish with as few obstructions as possible? We are designing this in free and fully functional software with one click ordering.
This is actually why I asked here. This has the potential to have small continual royalty if I partner with someone, or I can make them myself make a little more per board in trade for my time importing and exporting, testing and supporting…until someone else decides to make it and probably not give anything back. (sorry just thinking about the ramps boards).
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Oddly this works back into the corner I am always sitting in.
If it is going to be “open source” it should just be fully open right, MIT? Any other option is trying to block some entity from doing something. That goes against the spirit of the phrase.
If it is not then it would be open and non-commercial. Then you are specifically trying to block other companies from using your hard work, specific idea, R&D, and community for free…but allowing people to make one offs.
I understand both sides from an idealistic point of view, as a one person business it can be a difficult choice come Rent and Grocery day. In this case it feels different and MIT is a fine license. I honestly see no other choice for a PCB design. If you show the schematic to help people make informed choices, and you can obviously see the actual hardware the trying to keep the GERbers hidden are not really worth it. If someone wants to replicate a PCB this day and age it is easy to do. I think this board could be a good choice for a lot of machines, and could bring CNC prices down a notch because of it.
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all I can say is good luck with your decision and it will be cool speaking with you in person next weekend 
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I know this reference might be confusing to some, hopefully Ryan you see the humor.
But every time you type “open source” in this thread, I twitch and have flashbacks to the “discussion” of fall of 2019.
And yes, I personally lost a lot of respect there, and no, I (without any involvement) am still not over it.
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I was only thinking about knowing if someone gets a hardware failure whether it’s a board you made or not. The silkscreen you release doesn’t have to be the one you use yourself.
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O.k. so IF I read this correctly Bart is in Illinois. He needs to come to MRRF!
and bring goodies for us to learn with!
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O.k. So now I want this setup!!! A CNC Automatic Tool Changer (ATC) use Grbl_ESP32 - YouTube
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