SoylentNews

caseih [soylentnews.org] writes:

A thoughtful post on the Adafruit Blog chronicles the problems facing open-source hardware companies [adafruit.com], and how more and more companies, including Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa, are becoming more and more proprietary and closed source. In Arduino's case, they are deliberately trying to stamp out the clones undercutting them. The new Arduino Pro is not open source in any way, and the web site has now removed references to being an open source company. This is indeed sad news and I'm not sure how this will impact the vibrant maker community.

As always there are subtleties and nuances. In the case of Prusa, not only are Chinese companies taking Prusa designs and source to make proprietary, closed-source products, they are also actively patenting designs and algorithms they've taken from open source, freezing out the companies and developers that made it all possible.

With Red Hat moving to be a proprietary software company (which happens to use and work on open source projects) and now these reports, what are soylenters' thoughts on the future of open source companies and economics? Are truly open source companies doomed to failure, especially when overseas companies do not respect or even understand the principles of open source development? To me this reinforces the importance of the GPLv3, not that that stops dishonest companies.

Original Submission