Can You Make Money on Open Source Projects? | Alicia Gibb Seidle

Shall you open source your project or not? How to promote it and protect it? This video may help. Thank you very much Alicia

Links:

Chapters:
00:00 What is this video about
01:04 Business model for open source hardware and some examples
11:13 How to promote your open source project
15:49 Arduino
22:29 Using a trademark
32:08 Open source is not for everyone
36:31 Open source and popularity and safety and regulations
43:16 Open hardware in Space
47:38 Open source hardware in Bio Tech
52:50 Open hardware in Medical
54:57 Popular areas for open source hardware
58:18 What you should build?
1:01:10 Experience with Kickstater
1:06:51 Need help with your open source projects? fellowship, mentors, grants and founding
1:14:47 Why to design open source hardware
1:21:08 What tools / software to use to design open source hardware
1:25:31 Where to file patents and trademarks

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Would you like to support me? It's simple:

It is much appreciated. Thank you,
- Robert

[evren.builds]

22:25 I think you pointed out something that is pretty critical. Trademark and the reference back to the original would be the only thing protecting the project. Even then I don't know how you would protect against your product being mass produced abroad. Even though you have the trademark you'd still need to have the power to go after them. For an individual or a small team just coming up with a product this wouldn't be a great way to go. Also the cost of the trademark is still not that cheap.
28:46 OSHW certification would be great as it is free and they would also protect it.

[jasonthorpe]

Great talk, and lots of good information. I would have liked to hear more about certification, as without passing various certifications (FCC, EC, etc.), it's not even legal to sell most hardware, and so that's a much bigger barrier to making money with hardware, open source or not...

[jimjjewett]

The thought that patents are more open than trade secrets is ... aspirational. That is the way they are described in school, and likely the way they were intended to work, but it is generally not the way they work in practice. As annoying as that is, I don't see a way to reform it that would withstand decades of attack from lawyers and financiers.

[_-martin-_]

Sparkfun and similar are not really the representative of successful OSHW business per say, they are more just traditional traders of products / components, some of which happen to be OSHW but mostly fairly simple products. The real interesting question here is whether or not it is possible to design and sell traditional / complex products as OSHW, products you put a lot of design resources into, without running the risk of it getting ripped off / copied, resulting in reduced ROI and maybe even loss of business.

[thirtythreeeyes]

As a person who is very into things like FPV, 3D printing and arduino open source is the gift that created all my favorite things and hobbies. I would never have got into electronics without open source projects it has basically created the entire modern maker movement. Whether it's a good business model can be argued but, the value given to society is undeniable and there is certainly an altruistic reason for going open source. If anyone questions the benefit of open source just think about Linux and how it has single handedly changed the world in so many ways.

[evren.builds]

Does anybody have examples of strong open source hardware project that have failed even though they had a very strong product? I feel like we can also learn a lot from failures.

[almondhete]

What I think is a bit unsatisfying is, that most of those open source projects are so simple and kinda boring that all the fuzz about them is unnecessary IMHO. I mean look at the mentioned 1800 projects. How many of those are high quality content? A face shield or putting LEDs into Lego bricks, the 1000th 3D printer kit, really? Projects those really creating value like an DNA sequenzer, a pick and place machine or a VNA are very rare.

[MartinWolker]

Well, Prusa Research makes a lot of money on Open Source 3D printers 💪 so I expect that I will find YES in this video 🙃

[zakariakhamees]

As someone who is interested in open sourcing a project, this was very helpful. Thank you Alicia and Robert.

But i have a very important question. As the owner of the project, i have the right to choose whether my product is allowed to be commercially used or not. So what do we call a project that is shared completely to the public to do what ever they want with it except using it commercially (sell it etc) ??
I can't find another term other than open source hardware!

[aarondcmedia]

Pretty sure Sparkfun, as one example, makes money from open source projects. They are other people's projects, but they are open source and SF make money from them, so there's that.

[terminsane]

check out the ELRS opensource project, and all the companies making money off it.

[christopherjackson]

For people looking to clean up oil spills or democratize medicine what benefits does open source provide over making the project public domain?

[atheatos]

Open Source Hardware is pointless unless maybe if it is something very simple.
None is gonna modify the source. None needs the source.
Also complex designs can not be assembled by normal people.
So this only allows third parties to flood ebay with cheap Chinese copies.
Sparkfun and others just make money of other peoples work.
The original creator usually gets nearly nothing.

Now for sure, patents are also pointless.
The best way to protect your work and make money is by using...
a FGPA or a microcontroller and then lock the code.

[biswajit]

Could you please reduce the course fee it's too high for the Asian countries

[fpgaguy]

Definitely avoid buying anything with patents