So Bre Pettis finally sold Makerbot Industries for 1/2 billion dollars. It definitely puts your monthly ABS budget & the concerns of whether to splurge on the 2 color extruder in perspective when you realize the founder walked away with at least 1/4 billion dollars.
Once again, it's not the revenue from Makerbot sales or speculation on the value of being able to print goods, but the enormous library of widgets users of the Makerbot submitted to thingiverse.com for free, over 100,000 in total, & which Bre was able to monetize with the acquisition. Like the instagram & tumblr acquisitions, a massive amount of data was created for free while the true value of it was monetized by just a few individuals. Is that the way open source hardware is supposed to work?
The answer we're supposed to give is yes, the world should be based on legions of people producing data for free & the true value of that data being concentrated into 1 top individual in these massive buyouts. The creators of the data should not be compensated because we all want to be the top guy.
We've had these massive payouts for data since the internet got big in 1999 & the amount of data that cost nothing to download became truly massive. Initially they were in the form of the Redhat, VA Research IPOs, later in the form of the modern social network giga acquisitions, maybe now the open hardware giga acquisitions.
The concept of data that we create in full faith that it's supposedly free having a massive amount of monetary value in the invisible hand of the economy isn't going away. Neither is a landlord going to turn around & open source his rental properties just because we provided the data that paid for his assets for free. It's well known that wealth is being concentrated at the top a lot more than it ever was & times are much harder for the rest of us than our parents.
But what if the creators of the data were compensated in the buyouts instead of the total amount being focused at the top guy? Would the creators of the data not be able to hire people on their own, create jobs, buy stuff on their own?
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2 years after Bre got his $600 million reward, the staff finally got theirs: pink slips.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/makerbot-just-laid-off-20-percent-...
Yes as if they are not releasing files they are violating all lics starting from generic Arduino license. I have on my hands one Rev.G board that needs repair and they have big OHSW logo on center of the board saying based on Arduino Mega and GPLv3 but no files not where. Also all files pointing to compile firmwares etc has suddenly disappeared from their websites. That's what often happens when you let investors in... Who's next ?
Great post. Why should the rewards for the work of so many go to so few? Seems like a great starting point for a class action law suit.
Has anyone seen anywhere MightyBoard Rev G and H schematics. Only schematics that can be found from Thingverse is Rev E.
Thanks Bill.
About the discussion at the beginning of this post: Monroe, I agree with your post. Contributors to OS projects do so for their own reasons and, hopefully, in full understanding of the nature of the end game possibilities. Where would we be without those who take the chances, both monetary and personal effort, to promote projects and invest in building hardware?
Chris (Anderson) illuminates the whole movement and it's effect on the global economy in his excellent book "Makers: The new Industrial Revolution". It's informative and lays out exciting thoughts and (almost endless) possibilities for those who choose to pursue their ideas in all these new technologies.
@Cliff: New schematics use lot's of labels to represent common connections so you don't get a 'ratsnest' of lines. It can be confusing at first, but you can click the 'show' (eye icon) and when you click on a wire it highlights all the common connections.
You are welcome Cliff!
I hope you can get the unit running again an will send a friend request so we can take this off-blog.
-=Doug
@ R.D. Starwalt, I managed to download the files you mentioned [Download this thing] and am now able to see
Yippee! What a dogs breakfast! Its going to take me a while to put that jigsaw puzzle together. Thank you!
I dunno Cliff, I'm just a mechanical engineer. I was going to go on a rant about how we still use simple drawings that anybody can read, etc, but I guess that's not really true anymore. Everybody is using a 3D CAD package now, and they aren't even dimensioning and tolerancing it anymore as they just plug it into a CNC machine.
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