I have read through a few kerfluffles here concerning “copying” designs. Since the esk8 industry is still in its infancy it might be good to have a discussion about intellectual property and the rules surrounding it. I have been a part of the commercial space business for over 30 years and have lived though the growth of a nascent industry. I was on the board that decided how we would handle inventions for IP protection at Boeing Satellite Systems.
First, understand that it is not easy to prevent copycats. My first recommendation is to always keep your technology moving forward so the portion of the competition that likes to copy is always playing catch up. If someone copies your design you have to do, and have done in advance, several things if you want to stop them.
You must have protection for your design. Generally recorded as either a patent or a trade secret. The difference being a patent involves public release and description of the invention, often resulting in copying, while a trade secret is not publicly released.
For a patent you must protect the invention from public disclosure before the patent has been applied for.
For a trade secret you must protect the invention from public disclosure period.
Clearly, if you want to advertise the advantages of your product, a trade secret is not really a practical answer. They are meant more for businesses like mine, where customers have inside knowledge of who can build what.
If you advertise, write stories, or allow stories to be written extolling the technical advantages of your product, you have released that information in the public domain.
If you release it in the public domain without patent protection then anyone can copy that design and there is nothing you can do about it.
Demonstrating prior art allows you continued use of the product despite someone else patenting the invention. It can be used to block a patent application. It does not prevent someone else from using the same invention.
If you have done all of that correctly and someone still copies your design you have to get them in a courtroom and prove they have infringed on your IP. It is not easy.
I hope that clears a few things up.
I have six patents BTW. I saw what looked like an exact copy of one of them one time. You know what I think happened? They designed the same thing I did. Engineering principals often lead to the same solutions.
If you release your design as open source fully expect people to clone it.
Accept that this is going to happen and use it to your advantage. Make it easy for people to help you improve it and don’t be upset when someone mass produces your design.
Quite often people open source the software and design for something they make and sell. Then when it becomes popular someone else comes in and mass produces the hardware. Now the creator of the project has no revenue stream but still has to help with customers.
The better way to do it is to build a community around your thing and make clear the expectations so that customers do not get mad at you when the knock off widget that uses your software doesn’t work as expected.
One of the biggest hurdles I have seen is poor management that in many ways seems adversarial to new contributors. The whole point of open source is that people can help out and catch mistakes. If your code base is a fucking mess that no one can manage to build from source then good luck getting anyone to help out.
So when Rideneo claim their new escs are opensource but don’t publish the schematics, or is their claim it’s based on opensource design. Wouldn’t this constitute a breach of gpl. I want to know as I am working on my own ESC design.
They actually did publish the schematics for it, it’s a derivative of the focbox hardware (which was also published at schematic level).
Technically if you use the schematics from the OS project and make improvements to the design, you are supposed to contribute those changes back to the project and/or otherwise publish your work publicly.
In regards to the VESC-Project itself, the software is where 90% of the effort lies in the project at this point and the fact that it can detect & function on a large number of 3rd party hardware devices means that it works without modification for most derivative ESCs on the market already.
Morally, if you are benefiting from an OS project you should contribute back to it in any way that you feel is beneficial to the project. It’s not about ‘bare minimum for compliance’, it’s about actively engaging with other developers and understanding where contributions are needed most.