Creating a circuit design "co-op"

[Carl-NC]

With the Internet making it almost trivial to set up organized design projects that pull in tech experts from anywhere on Earth, has anyone ever tried creating an electronics design team this way? Or does anyone know of a commercially marketed gadget that was designed by an online collaboration? Something like GNU, but hardware, and probably with less openness.

I'm toying with such an idea, where 2 or 3 design teams work on targeted projects, but I'm concerned about what to do if we actually end up with something commercially worthwhile. Primarily IP rights and how to fairly compensate people if something makes money.

- Carl

 

[Leftyretro]

With the Internet making it almost trivial to set up organized design projects that pull in tech experts from anywhere on Earth, has anyone ever tried creating an electronics design team this way? Or does anyone know of a commercially marketed gadget that was designed by an online collaboration? Something like GNU, but hardware, and probably with less openness.

I'm toying with such an idea, where 2 or 3 design teams work on targeted projects, but I'm concerned about what to do if we actually end up with something commercially worthwhile. Primarily IP rights and how to fairly compensate people if something makes money.

- Carl

Hard to get both the advantages of GNU type collaborative design help while still protecting commercially IP rights ( for who?, equal to all or to their subjective contribution value to the whole project?) .

I don't think anything can come of it unless group design is freely available to all to do with as they wish. Without a written contract, either GNU type or private party type, it would be risky to assume one's effort will be commercially rewarded or protected.

Commercial Vs open source is a very interesting topic and the software side has several years of experiance and many useful products to show for it. I'm not aware of any hardware based open source(design) projects or groups but it would be interesting to see it happen.

Lefty

 

[3v0]

In general a good idea is not enough to make money. It needs to be marketed, supported etc. If you can get the budget breakdown for hi tech firms you will find that R&D spending is not the major share.

Ten or more years ago a distributed group(s) designed and built an automotive engine management system. EFI, spark control that sort of thing. No profit motive that I could see.

 

[Sceadwian]

One good idea in practice can result in billions of dollars of profits. The free shareing of ideas is a good thing, but when money is involved they're not so shared. Free Utopian or ideal societies are all wonderful concepts in both goal and freedom for the indivudual, but not in practice. Try socialism. It's the ideal society, no one has ever done it right. S'what you get when you deal with people.

 

[Pommie]

The only open source and hardware project I know of is the **broken link removed**.

Mike.

 

[ericgibbs]

One of the problems would be how to protect the 'groups' designs from being patented by an outside third party.

I know that its possible to claim 'first disclosure rights' on a novel idea but where would the money come from
to protect the 'openess' of the design?

Also, someone in the group would have to carry out a patent search prior to any article being published
to avoid legal action over existing/pending patents.

As a concept is a great idea, but having been in business for many years, my experience would make me think the chances of it meetings its goals are virtually zero.

However, if such group was formed, I would be pleased to give support.

 

[Tomble]

Hi, as something of a Free Software zealot (still am), I was rather interested in something similar to what your suggestion sounds like some years ago, before I got seriously into electronics. However, I think that what your terms for the idea sound like, and what your description seems to imply, are somewhat at odds with each other.

The GNU project is not so much "open", as "Free as in speech" as its proponents often like to say. They make software so it exists, not so they can make money. They benefit because they get to use the sort of software they'd like to have, and everybody else gets to use it too. If other people get a bit of profit (within reason) for making the software available to more people, so what?

That is the sort of thing I was interested in, and still am, re the hardware design idea. Guess what? There's quite a few groups like that, and actually I'm quite surprised nobody else mentioned them!

http://www.opencores.org design free HDL type "IP cores" for synthesizing in programmable logic, or even in ASICs if you have the means They have loads of designs there and have a preferred standard bus for communicating between subcomponents ("Wishbone" apparently).
**broken link removed** is a site that basically links and announces various resources regarding open hardware, whether in terms of software tools or designs or whatever.
http://www.freeio.org/ is, um.. I forget. Somewhere in between either of those I guess

There's probably a few other sites like that I've forgotten or not seen yet. And certainly numerous other groups who had the goal of designing some specific piece of fancy hardware, eg the LART and "Balloon" embedded computer boards, the F-CPU, the LEON CPU(?), and recently spotted, the "Manticore" 3d graphics card! (that seems to be a bit abandoned tho )

To my mind, this sort of thing makes much more sense. Collaborate openly to make something because you want it to exist.

 

[Carl-NC]

Some good replies, thanks. Time to clarify...

There are a bunch of metal detector design nerds who hang out on my **broken link removed** forums. Most of us have day jobs, family, and many other priorities, but we also have some really promising design ideas that we all would like to develop, but can't do it solo. So the thought is that a broader collaboration -- even though a spare-time-effort -- would get some of these ideas onto PCBs.

This is a super-low-volume market, with a half-dozen or so companies controlling 95% of the market. Most of us don't want to just toss these concepts out on the Internet, and let the detector companies walk away them. So we are trying to think of how to structure this whole scheme so we can somehow maintain some level of control over the technology, and maybe sell/license our designs.

The concept is like GNU in that it involves a world-wide coalition of mostly spare-time participants, but unlike GNU in that we would rather shield key pieces of technology, and try to make a little money along the way. It may turn out that this simply isn't practical, and we just do the designs, and everyone involved gets to do whatever they want to with them, whether that is to make their own products, or sell a design to an established company. Or, just make them public.

I just thought that there are others who have been down this road. The examples given so far appear to be truly open efforts, and focus more on basic technology rather than an end consumer product.

Regards,
Carl

 

[Torben]

Hi Carl!

Not sure if these sorts of things are exactly what you mean, but they seem to fit:

• Arduino: an open-source hardware controller platform. (http://www.arduino.cc/)
• CommonSound is a collaborative effort focusing on music effects hardware. (http://www.commonsound.com/) Not really open source but at least it encourages working together online for free schematics.

That's all I can think of at the moment.


Torben