- you say you favour free software and free hardware, yet they are both based on respectively selling labour and hardware, but do not charge any IP rent

- Marcin does exactly the same, yet you condemn him …

So, why say you support it, but then condemn who does exactly what you support …

I’m sorry, but this position fails to make any logical sense,

If you want to be concrete, why be ‘for’ Arduino, but against ‘OSE’, if both use broadly the same strategy?

Michel

Michel, from my POV it does not make sense to play this pingpong game any longer. If you reject my central point of alienation and I reject yours of show-me-the-money, we don’t come further.

There is a nice book released some weeks ago (titled »Peninsulas Against the Stream«), which shows a lot of different projects (about 100) and ways to deal which the money-coercion we all can not not escape from. It was completely surprising to me, that only very few projects use selling to finance their project, and that there a lot of projects, which are quite aware of the dangers of alienation by simply using capitalist means (alternatives are very different: donations, state support, fixed membership contributions, dumpster diving, free shops, mutual support etc.). The book only covers projects in german speaking countries and was released only in german. I got the impression that the discourse here has come much further than in the english-speaking regions. But I also don’t have illusions.

So do please enlighten me, and him. Don’t chicken out on this one. This is a crucial debate, as most of the open hardware projects that I know, are selling their products.
Again, do let me know your knowledge about the alternatives,
 
Michel

[29.08., 14.30:] Even if the progress up to now has been good, I doubt if you will be able to hold it up if you don’t change some things. Don’t forget that a new project is given some credibility in advance to do what it promises to do. If it should become clear that this is not really peer production, the dedicated and able people drawn to FeF in the past might no longer arrive.

A crisis is the time to learn. As far as I can see, you’re not doing it. Conflicts arise everywhere, they’re not the problem. But brushing this conflict away as a mistake with an excuse to the victims won’t help in the long run, because the “mistake” is just a symptom of something fundamentally wrong: Your authoritarian leadership methods, which have in the past led to mistakes, as testified by many former supporters on this site. Errors that would have been avoided if the knowledge and opinions of everyone then in the project would have been taken into account – if, in other words, this were peer production, because that’s what peer production is all about.

Peer production is about working together on a project, its advantage is using the potential and ideas of everyone involved. If you continue to think that “you have the vision” and the others have to follow, the project is in serious danger of failing.

Why is my position so hard to understand? All I am saying is, that we have to be aware of the massive drawbacks of blindly accepting alien market logics. And I observe, that nobody is doing that. Why?

You are arguing, that because you see »’not selling’ not as very realistic« we have to sell. Dot. This position stops any critical analysis at this point: »We are selling because we have, so why are you disturbing us with your weird questions?« This is your message to me. By that you are turning reality upside down: I have to explain, why I am disturbing you by my warnings, instead of you have to explain, how to prevent alien logics affecting internal relationsships of the projects — crazy! I seldom read critical self-reflections of projects like OSE. And then at some point they fail. Surprisingly. Does this have anything to do with importing alien logics by selling? Noooo, selling is quite natural, simply a means for good goals. Etc. — How naive.

There is a wide range of opportunities to care for finances being necessary for a project. You know them, I don’t have to show you. All of them have some pros and some cons. Balancing them require analysis. Let’s do that instead of rejecting critical questions. And this is, what I propose for OSE to do, too.

Anyway: material goods require cost-recovery. This is a different case. You can not compare it with free software.

However, from the necessity of cost-recovery does not compulsorily follow, that OSE must sell their product. It is a decision to do the cost-recovery that way! There are other ways as many projects show.

I only want to emphasize, that a) it is a special case for rival goods, b) we should be aware, that selling imports alien market logics and overlays internal commons relationship.

If you trivilize this danger the way you do (»it’s all the same cost-recovery«), then we are not able to be sensible enough, to go against the alien forces imposed from the market logics by binding the project success to conquering market share. The result occurs in those crashes we have here with OSE.

As Richard Stallman and others insist, FO/SS can be sold, and sometimes is, but this is not done generally because it is a non-rival good that can be downloaded on the internet for free. But open hardware is not free, because material goods require cost-recovery and are rival goods. Hence, OSE must sell them, but at a very moderate price without monopoly rent. The latter is so because free designs means others can make it at cost if they want. This is not a sinister plan to destroy the competion. The FOSS equivalent of this is developers getting a wage or selling their labor time, because that is a rival good and they need to feed their families.

This means that Marcin’s project is equivalent in this crucial sense, they both give their design for free, and get money for cost-recovery.

So the issue should focus on the legimaticy of a hierarchical order within a peer project, not on the fact that Marcin has to operate on the marketplace to survive, just as FOSS developers do, except for those who are rentiers.

Michel