Re: gEDA-user: licensing (GPL or otherwise) for hardware?

[Karel Kulhavy <clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 08:09:07PM +0000, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > I realize that open source is a religious matter for some, but guess  
> > what: I work for a living.
> 
> Guess what, I do too, albeit doing firmware, board bring-up, drivers,
> BSD and Linux ports, etc. rather than hardware design.  In the vast
> majority of cases the software/firmware work I get paid to do is
> totally worthless crap that no one in the free world in his right mind
> would want to use even if it was free -- simply because the kind of
> requirements that management likes to impose in the paid world are the
> antithesis of what is considered technical quality in the free world.

The management has figured out what people pay for and what they don't pay
for.

> 
> In other words, the value to humanity of most of my paid work is zero.

No - the humanity would be much more eager for that commercial technically
mediocre crap the manager-led teams are churning out than for the free
software. Look how many people use Windows and how many Linux?

According to my opinion you are thinking about some hypothetical humanity that
values goods which are reliable, and whose design rulez, but that differs from
the actual humanity.

The problem here is:
a) Free software engineers optimize only for technical quality and ignore
   usability (well when you already know how to work with that tool because
   you wrote it, you have no way how to tell the usability)
b) Managers optimize only for usability and ignore technical quality (well when
   you've studied economy school you have no way to tell the technical quality).

You can't really expect managers to be able to change their behaviour,
therefore the free software engineers have to optimize for technical quality
and usability at the same time for this problem to disappear. And with that I
doen't mean KDE, where every other system configuration submenu segfaults.

The goal is to make the project be usable by a trained monkey. Then even
more mentally advanced species like Homo Consumericus can use it (and be
slowly turned into Homo Creativus without their knowledge).

Practically it's done that the FS engineer employs someone that have as little
technical experience as possible. If he smokes weed, rides snowboard,
skateboard and surfs, then he's got likely the best qualification for that.
That person then does user interface quality control, helps with the UI design
and scans documentation for mistakes and omissions.

It's also about marketing. Not marketing in the modern re-defined sense where
marketing==deception, but in the Wikipedia sense: "Marketing is a social and
managerial function that attempts to create, expand and maintain a collection
of customers. It attempts to deliver demand satisfying output through
profitable exchanges." There's no difference if the user doesn't use your
program because it crashes, or because he doesn't know about it's existence.
The result is the same.

> Seen in this light, the time I waste doing paid work is time stolen from
> Humanity.  And when I manage to steal back company time by working on
> personal stuff while on paid time at a client's site (like I'm doing
> right now), I'm actually doing a valiant deed for humanity.

What if your boss sees you doing personal stuff - does he fire you?

> 
> On some rare occasions a paid client will have me develop some piece of
> software or firmware that would actually have value to humanity.  On
> those rare occasions I always ensure that the work gets open-sourced,
> if necessary without the client's knowledge.  Other times I use my
> clients' ignorance of the precise terms of the GPL and other free
> software licenses and make them believe that they have to open-source
> the kernel module I wrote for example, even if they really don't have
> to.
> 
> > And when you're doing hardware design,  
> > where the capital costs of a project can be quite high (gotta buy  
> > parts, make and stuff PCBs, build enclosures, meet applicable safety  
> > specs, etc), as opposed to software development where the costs are  
> > in time alone, the notion of giving away a completed, ready-to-build  
> > design is silly.
> 
> On the service-to-humanity side of my life, I'm currently working on a
> hardware design (the Open source SDSL Debug and Connectivity Unit) which
> is a fairly complex microprocessor system and in which I fully expect to
> incur and am prepared to expend all of the costs that you have listed
> (with the exception of EMC/safety compliance because I'm a law-breaking
> anarchist), and even an additional cost of hiring someone else to do the
> layout step because I'm not good at it myself, yet the project is
> completely and totally open source.  You can check my current state of
> schematic drawing out of my public CVS repository if you want.  It isn't
> even GPL'ed or BSD-licensed, it's public domain and uncopyrighted.
> I don't copyright my work because as an anarchist I find it hypocritical
> to seek copyright or any other legal protection from the same
> governments that I seek to overthrow.

Don't overthrow the government. The problem is not in the couple of people in
the government. The problem is in the mass of the population. Overthrow Homo
Consumericus into Homo Creativus by first r00tkitting his brain with a free
software product that camouflages itself as a usable product. And it will be a
benefit for me too because I hate spending time over badly written manuals ;-)

CL<
> 
> In the case of this design its open source nature is a critical feature
> of the gadget itself and its application.  The gadget is a tool for a
> project whose goal is to open-source the SDSL Internet connection
> technology.  It would be hypocritical for a gadget whose only purpose in
> life is to help open-source something else not to be open source itself.
> 
> Bright Blessings of Yuletide,
> Space Falcon
> 
> 
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