When I worked for a large company (mostly engineering, 140k ppl), there were pretty big bounties for getting patents. It started with submitting an internal review, which paid a bonus of a hundred dollars or so. Up to a bonus of $5k or so for a granted patent. That doesn’t include all the lawyer labor and the engineer labor for doing all the paperwork.
They weren’t very discerning. They spent a lot of money getting patents. I didn’t ever hear of them enforcing anything or leveraging them. But they were such a big company that having them in case they needed them as leverage was worth the cost.
I think that you should make money from each build, after all you put all the time and effort into making a machine that people can build themselves using your design. Compare the costs of building your machine vs what other machines cost. Most of us would not even be able to have a machine capable of CNC milling without your dedication and hard work. I am not sure how to capture a fee. Perhaps a fee for the stl files you have made would work if they choose not to purchase parts from you. As a person who has filed a patent application for an invention of mine, the process is a joke. They took my filing fee and then declined my application because they “thought my invention would not work”. I was using a working model every day and after 14 years my original model still functions exactly as I claimed it would and I use it all the time. But will I refile and give them more money, no. Because China will rip off the patent as soon as it is issued. That is if it would ever be issued to a poor person without hiring a Patent Attorney which I feel is very unlikely due to my experience.
What about a system like Skyentific? The designs and STLs are not open source, but are under copyright? Someone else suggested paying for access to the designs. So you have a subscription price. You have access to the designs via your account. If you buy so many dollars of store merchandise, you get an account for so long. If you buy a subscription and then buy equipment, it can be applied as a store credit. If you aren’t good at creating educational content, then don’t do it. However, having YouTube videos about different projects and components does work well for marketing. On secondary designs, allow people to put modifications into the system. If people ask for them to be printed, they get a piece of the action. Allow people to add software or educational videos, or provide services, and create an ecosystem. This is an existing business model and there are a number of open source e-commerce projects that could be tweaked to support it.
I am not say charge a huge amount for your designs, but set boundaries, and incorporate the needs and desires of your community, such as tweaking models into your business model.
The copyright gives you some protection, but it isn’t going to stop the weasels from selling poor product, but it will stop bigger ripoffs if you want to fight them.
As an aside, I don’t think open-source is dying. Not even close. I have been writing software for over 45 years. I love open source. Look at projects like Kubernetes or Libre Office or gRPC or all the projects on Github. I just saw an open source mower two days ago.
There is one thing that I think could benefit you two ways. Make a pay wall for parts of the support forum. I know that this creates an elite culture. But I am willing to pay for a well run interesting forum. IE (Lumen labs or Joes CNC.) These were both great forums.
They sold plans and access to forums. It did keep the community smaller. Not great for parts sales. Some people would be left out but there could still be a public searchable forum that would get interaction but not immediate.
I also think that when its more private people tend to share more of there other projects making content even better. This payment could also give access to the more complete cad files. To look at for assembly and possible modification.
Just my two cents I am usually more of a lurker than poster.
I didn’t want to start an argument, but I agree. A lot of the momentum in FOSS has moved to the web. On both front and back ends. Microsoft has an Ubuntu subsystem for Linux you can install in windows. vscode is OSS. Android phones run Linux. Chrome and Firefox are OSS projects.
IMO, open source software has won a seat at the table. Stronger than ever. It doesn’t need a huge crowd to stay alive either. It has way more than critical mass at this point.
Wow. There’s a blast from the past. I was a moderator on the Lumenlab forums.
I didn’t always agree with the paywall. It was a fairly low hurdle though, but I thought that it didn’t always do Grayson as much good as it would have to be more open.
That’s also where I met Joe, and looked into his CNC plans, but I never had the bootstrap CNC to cut the parts to build his. Now I do, but I don’t need his. (I’m pretty sure one of his hybrid machines could do better than my Primo, but at a few times the build price, not worth it for me.)
Dan I do remember you on both of those forums and maybe the RC forums where Hobby CNC started for me. Then CNC zone before it was sold and became the wild wild west. I respect your opinion about the pay wall. I just think it may be another revenue stream in this supply chain issue world we now live in.
Really!!!?!! OMG, I wanted to build that CNC so bad. I made one of the Fresnel lens projectors giant metal halide lamp or something like that. IT was awesome. I was blasting movies on a wall and blew my friends minds. That site was sooooooo awesome.
I wish that lumen labs was still around. There was so much great info and other entertaining threads on that site. I guess I wish there were more communities like that on the web now.
One of the prijects waiting for some CNC time is the Pro Lens projector that I built as a beta tester. I’ve used it for years in the box I put together to test the lens. That is one of the projects that I put together the “proof of concept” build and just used it that way ever since. The LCD control board is still suspended in the box with duct tape. It’s probably got thousands of hours on the lamp, still shines bright. I did replace the original LCD panel to upgrade from 720p to 1080p.
I had some theory of optics from before that, which I re-learned and expanded on heavily. Too bad so much of what I wrote about it all was lost when those forums went down. I had specs on LCDs and optics that is really hard to track down when I wanted it all again.
I know you stated in the other thread that you didn’t want to sell the .stl files, but jeez, how much work did you put into them? I agree with the others in this thread in that you should be paid at least something for every machine that gets built. Maybe keep them free but put the download links on a paywalled page?
I really like the way you do things now with offering up all the info, files, etc. for free but also offering pre-printed parts and pre-assembled kits. But I do think you could get away with charging a modest fee for your .stl’s, and/or charging for support, even if it’s this forum.
I also saw that you’re working on a ESP32 based controller; that would be a good way to profit if you made and sold a custom shield for your machines, and for noobs like me it would be nice to have an option like this that wouldn’t need a lot of tinkering or adapting.
I mostly like the idea of you offering a pretty all inclusive, relatively easy to buy & assemble kit that you sell at a premium price for users that have more money than time but still offer the low cost of entry option for folks that have time to do the legwork.
I remember how I started here. Things weren’t as professional then. But I saw the project on Thingiverse (I think there was a bearing competition at the time?). I was not sure if my cheapo printer could handle it, so I asked in the comments which part was the hardest. I was going to print that first.
I did, and it printed fine. I ordered the hardware from you (it was clear I wasn’t going to beat your prices and it would have taken me a half day to find sources). But I wanted to print the parts myself. It was part of the ideal of having a printer make a CNC machine.
I built it larger than the recommended size. It worked pretty well, and I just kept coming back to the forums.
I don’t think I would have a CNC machine if you didn’t make the parts available for free. It is something about being able to see the whole information for free that appealed to me. Even if you had let me have just that one Z part, I would have been suspicious about the rest being behind a paywall. I can definitely afford to pay for the files and I know now that they are worth it. But at the time, I couldn’t justify a CNC machine for my shop. I couldn’t unless it was a project I could make that would be low enough cost that I didn’t mind if it was wasted.
I also did not realize Ryan @vicious1 had a Patreon. I’ve been hearing about Patreon for quite a while but had never signed up until now. It’s not much money per month, but Ryan you are the first one I’ve signed up for. Thank you for all you do.
Regarding beefing up the Patreon, which itself functions as a type of paywall, yet one that does not impede open access to whatever is free and not a special benefit… as I see it the key to beefing it up is twofold: already having a crowd of interested onlookers (hence the free stuff outside the paywall is helpful), and clever, persuasive marketing of whatever special benefits are behind the paywall. I have many years of experience in design, graphics, video, audio, etc. If I can do anything to help let me know. I love my LowRider 2 and I am so grateful for all you do.
Regarding clever, persuasive marketing of the Patreon, one option is create something new and awesome that is perhaps intended to eventually be free, but also planned to be made available to Patreon level n, for some extended period in advance. For example, in the above scenario, if there were/are four levels of patrons, the top level could get a year of early access, the next level could get 9 months, and then 6 months and then 3 months. Finally, a year after going up for patrons, it opens up, but enhancements and upgrades could follow the same type schedule as well.
The above could also actually be a clever marketing tool, as long as you’re OK with the Patreon supporters being permitted to show off whatever that awesome thing is. Whenever I recently posted a few seconds of my LowRider doing its thing, a commentor replied asking who made that and what was it, because it looked so compelling and different. I steered him here. But in the above, I could have been steering him both here and to the Patreon.
