Opensource engineering or draw a plug-in to your car
In my spare time, various technical ideas swarm in my head. Sometimes stupid, sometimes quite a nothing. A fairly weighty part of them, after a year or a few, finds realization in life, often exactly as I imagined it to be.
I want to take advantage of this effect for “mercenary purposes” and tell the community one more such idea that it would be extremely interesting to see in life.
There is one good way to give your project popularity and long life - to make it a hobby. It has been successfully tested in the software industry for a long time: API + SDK + community of free developers - and soon your brainchild starts nursing, as with its, thousands of people, not sparing on it time, energy and often money.
It’s not enough for people to use - people want to create!
You just have to sell, maintain and update the core of the system, the community will do the rest for you.
Even better, open source. But I will not go into this, because the article is not about software, but on the contrary, about the hardware itself.
Meanwhile, in industry today everything is exactly the opposite.
Each nut is diligently patented, the product is hung with various TM and, like a war hero, with medals, and for making modifications to the product and even for opening its case, the manufacturer deprives you of a guarantee and ostracizes.
')
Instead, one could do the following ...
The developer and manufacturer of the product (let's call it Founder) divides the design of its product (for example, a car) into a conventional core and environment.
The founder provides open access to the working drawings of the product, in which the core is a whole and indivisible unit, having fastening, mating and connecting points for devices and peripheral parts.
Templates are also provided for developing peripheral nodes.
Templates, in turn, have three categories of elements:
On the example of tuning a car, in the case of creating, say, aerodynamic body kits, this might look like this:
front bumper template has:
A free developer registers on the Founder’s site, creates an account and gets access to download templates and design tools, as well as documentation on the required standards.
After completing the development of the site, he sends his models and drawings to the Founder's website, where a special script checks whether the integrity of the “red” and “yellow” elements in the drawing is preserved.
Further, with a certain frequency in the technical laboratory of the Founder, a commission is assembled, which subjects the submitted projects to technical, design and economic censorship. The Commission determines which of the works will be allowed to production, in which it is necessary to fix something, and which in general are worthless.
The free developer is informed about the results of this examination through a personal account and correspondence.
At the final stage, the developer is invited to participate in the testing of a pilot copy of the product.
In the case of a positive decision of the commission on the admission of development into production, a contract is concluded between the Founder and the Author, and its development is patented.
Projects accepted for production are included in the list from which the end user can choose a suitable product package.
Thus, the development comes in a free sale, the profit from which is divided in a certain proportion between the Founder and the author, according to the contract, and in addition the author gets the opportunity to order this part for free or with a big discount.
A scheme is also possible in which the author begins to receive deductions only after the proceeds from the sale of his product will cover production costs. All this is stipulated in the contract.
Everything described above is for the time being a very general and approximate idea that needs analytical and legal “doping”.
The main principles, in my opinion, are as follows:
Free developers can be both private individuals and companies, for example, design studios.
In the latter case, I suspect that this may be very much in demand. For example, the manufacturer of household appliances develops the core of the system - the engine, the drive and the “brains” of the washing machine, and free developers create many variants of its external appearance, write various improvements to the firmware, etc ...
That's all. I hope something like that will ever see the light.
If you know that somewhere it is already working successfully - tell us, it will be very interesting to study their experience.
I want to take advantage of this effect for “mercenary purposes” and tell the community one more such idea that it would be extremely interesting to see in life.
There is one good way to give your project popularity and long life - to make it a hobby. It has been successfully tested in the software industry for a long time: API + SDK + community of free developers - and soon your brainchild starts nursing, as with its, thousands of people, not sparing on it time, energy and often money.
It’s not enough for people to use - people want to create!
You just have to sell, maintain and update the core of the system, the community will do the rest for you.
Even better, open source. But I will not go into this, because the article is not about software, but on the contrary, about the hardware itself.
Who said that opensource can only be in the software?
Meanwhile, in industry today everything is exactly the opposite.
Each nut is diligently patented, the product is hung with various TM and, like a war hero, with medals, and for making modifications to the product and even for opening its case, the manufacturer deprives you of a guarantee and ostracizes.
')
Instead, one could do the following ...
Technical side
The developer and manufacturer of the product (let's call it Founder) divides the design of its product (for example, a car) into a conventional core and environment.
The founder provides open access to the working drawings of the product, in which the core is a whole and indivisible unit, having fastening, mating and connecting points for devices and peripheral parts.
Templates are also provided for developing peripheral nodes.
Templates, in turn, have three categories of elements:
- “Red elements” are obligatory and inviolable elements that provide fastening and mating with the core, they can neither be edited, nor removed, nor moved.
- “Yellow elements” - optional elements that also cannot be edited, but which can be freely removed, replaced with others and moved — these are standardized interfaces with other elements of the periphery.
- "Green elements" - this is the scope for free creativity, they can be edited as you like, within reason. The limits of reasonable - it is delineated boundaries, beyond which the detail should not go.
On the example of tuning a car, in the case of creating, say, aerodynamic body kits, this might look like this:
front bumper template has:
- "Red elements" - attachment points to the body and the line of interfacing with the wing, hood, radiator.
- "Yellow elements" - sockets for mounting fog lamps.
- "Green elements" - external aerodynamic contours of the bumper itself.
Organizational side
A free developer registers on the Founder’s site, creates an account and gets access to download templates and design tools, as well as documentation on the required standards.
After completing the development of the site, he sends his models and drawings to the Founder's website, where a special script checks whether the integrity of the “red” and “yellow” elements in the drawing is preserved.
Further, with a certain frequency in the technical laboratory of the Founder, a commission is assembled, which subjects the submitted projects to technical, design and economic censorship. The Commission determines which of the works will be allowed to production, in which it is necessary to fix something, and which in general are worthless.
The free developer is informed about the results of this examination through a personal account and correspondence.
At the final stage, the developer is invited to participate in the testing of a pilot copy of the product.
The economic side
In the case of a positive decision of the commission on the admission of development into production, a contract is concluded between the Founder and the Author, and its development is patented.
Projects accepted for production are included in the list from which the end user can choose a suitable product package.
Thus, the development comes in a free sale, the profit from which is divided in a certain proportion between the Founder and the author, according to the contract, and in addition the author gets the opportunity to order this part for free or with a big discount.
A scheme is also possible in which the author begins to receive deductions only after the proceeds from the sale of his product will cover production costs. All this is stipulated in the contract.
Basic principles
Everything described above is for the time being a very general and approximate idea that needs analytical and legal “doping”.
The main principles, in my opinion, are as follows:
- clear separation of the core and periphery in the product at the stage of its development
- a simple, understandable and maximally automated algorithm for exchanging working drawings and other documents between the manufacturer and free authors; in part, the idea can be borrowed from the opensource communities on the software.
- simple and clear model of economic relations between the manufacturer and the authors.
- the mechanism of selling the final product, which provides for the choice of its complete set by the buyer This is the most difficult moment in terms of sales planning. As everyone knows, in a restaurant, pre-cooked food is brought much faster ...
- “split guarantee” policy, an analogue of the “main + universe” delineation in Linux Ubuntu components
- simplified and accelerated procedure for patenting peripheral parts.
Free developers can be both private individuals and companies, for example, design studios.
In the latter case, I suspect that this may be very much in demand. For example, the manufacturer of household appliances develops the core of the system - the engine, the drive and the “brains” of the washing machine, and free developers create many variants of its external appearance, write various improvements to the firmware, etc ...
That's all. I hope something like that will ever see the light.
If you know that somewhere it is already working successfully - tell us, it will be very interesting to study their experience.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/120210/
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