[hpsdr] Minerva

[Scott Traurig]

It is the designer's choice whether or not they want to share their IP, and
how it is shared. If the electrical designers choose to share their
schematic and BOM openly, so be it, and indeed that was their decision.

I am not privy to the actual licensing used on the various aspects of this
particular hardware design, from schematic to finished CCA. However, it
would appear the owners of the schematic IP have clearly NOT chosen to flow
down TAPR open source hardware license restrictions on board designers that
forces sharing of their PCB implementation of the schematic. This is
unsurprising. If there was nobody both skilled and altruistic enough to do
the board design for free then that would be a very reasonable way of
seeing your design come to fruition for zero dollars, i.e. enter into an
agreement whereby the PCB supplier could protect their non-recurring
engineering investment.

The only way this would be "unfair", and I use that term very loosely
because "fair" really has nothing to do with it, is if the owners of the
schematic do not extend the same rights to all other board designers.

None of these folks have any duty to any of us other than to be honest
about what IP is open source and what IP is not, and under what open source
agreement it is (or is not) distributed.

I wasn't around for when all this started, but looking backwards it appears
that Apache stepped up to the plate, albeit with some conditions, when
nobody else did. They did not perform a "takeover", they were simply the
only game in town that was willing to do the board design on the Hermes
derivative works, and the price to see that work realized for zero NRE was
allowing Apache to maintain their PCB design as proprietary. A bit of
realpolitik if you will, fallen from the purer faith of open source, but a
realistic and reasonable decision to make it happen. But, all that said,
knowing (in the internet sense) the people involved, that would not seem to
preclude others from doing doing their own board designs, now or later.

Finally, one can have all the expectations in the world, but they mean
nothing if it's not worth it to the supply side to meet them. Suppliers in
an open market have no duty to produce products they don't find profitable.
If you can find someone to make a new PCB design, including options for
solder mask and/or BGA attachment, for free, as a hobby activity, then I
would encourage you to do so. However, even if you had to pay for
professional PCB design services, it might not be that unrealistic to do
that if you thought you had a sufficient market. I would hazard a rough
guess that the non-recurring engineering for a board of the complexity of a
Minerva would cost perhaps $10,000, give or take. You could amortize this
at $100 per board for the first 100, plus the price of the bare board (or
bare plus solder mask and/or BGA attach), and after that you keep the price
the same and it's all profit. Or you could crowd-fund, which might be a
safer way to go. Take the resulting design files and publish them under
whatever open source license you want, put all of the crowd-fund
contributors on the license. Of course then you still have to fab the
boards.

73,

Scott/w-u-2-o


On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 1:11 PM, K4KV <k4kv at k4kv.com> wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
>
> And, Scott, the "thats what it sounds like to me" refers to the fact that
> Apache will withhold
>
> stuff like they did on Angelia.  Yes, it was a modification of the Hermes,
> from which they would
>
> have never been able to do an Angelia.  I could never build my Angelia
> because no paste mask
>
> was made available.
>
> Just because you and others cannot or will not build their own units,
> there are plenty of us that
>
> do.  And, if BGAs are used, I would expect that we would be offered boards
> with the BGAs and such
>
> loaded onto them.  I have NO problem paying for that.
>
> Let me have the tools, and I will have you a board for EVERYONE in a
> couple weeks.
>
> My point is: it is fine for Apache to do a Minerva, but AFTER the 'open'
> part of openHPSDR is
>
> done their bit.
>
> And remember, I bought a 7000.
>
> For me, it is just another disappointment, after waiting for Hermes II for
> a long time...
>
> 73
>
> Glen K4KV
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhpsdr.org/pipermail/hpsdr-openhpsdr.org/attachments/20180627/bef987e4/attachment.html>