Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Product as a Platform
The product as a platform approach is something very interesting for open source hardware
developers.Anopensourceproductismuchmorelikelytobecomeaplatformthanaclosed
one, two great examples of this being the 3D printing industry and the Arduino microcon-
troller with its many derivatives. Open design files give people many more possibilities
to interact with your product. Such interactions are especially likely to occur when others
can find interesting ways to make a living with your product by developing and providing
add-ons or services, or by adapting your product to local circumstances. In this fashion,
your product will grow as a platform. For example, many professionals are using Arduino
products for consulting or professional prototyping. The more stakeholders there are, the
more powerful and useful the product can become, and the more stable the platform will
be. For this reason, having your product copied by others is not necessarily a bad thing.
Just design your business model to accommodate this possibility. You can see here why a
noncommercial license is not open source. Not giving others the possibility to make a liv-
ing out of your product would reduce the number of stakeholders and limit the potential
growth of your platform. Of course, not every product is fit for the “product as a platform”
approach.
Lower Legal Fees and Quicker Time to Market
Closing things is expensive. Patents, lawyers, lawsuits, secrecy agreements, and safety
measures like prohibitively expensive insurance, to name a few, take a lot of time and
money. In the United States, the patent application fee is $17,000 plus legal fees and en-
gineering fees. Usually patents cost a company upward of $50,000. But the real cost of a
patent comes from fighting the battle if someone infringes on that patient; resolving such a
dispute can take millions or billions of dollars depending on how big your wallet is. Going
open source could mean lower legal fees. Big companies often spend more money on the
legal side than they devote to research and development. Being open source can save you a
lot of money, which you can then invest in other things. Of the companies interviewed for
this chapter, five reported that they bootstrapped. For those five bootstrapped companies,
the annual legal fees combined was $110,000, which includes a frivolous trademark battle
from an outside company for having a similar (but different) name. Most companies noted
that the money spent on legal fees was earmarked for obtaining trademarks.
“How much money do you spend each year on legal fees?
'Approximately $5000 a
year, but the bulk of this is for contract review and is not tied to IP [intellectual
property]. Our IP legal fees are nominally $0.'” (SparkFun Electronics)
“Publish early, publish often” is a common mantra of the open source software com-
munity. Publishing early and often establishes prior art, which is a legal hook that open
