Trademarks are wholly different from intellectual property patents and copyrights…
I mean, like, kids don’t get to vote, or smoke, or drive, or own a credit card. They don’t get those things until they’re older. They’re also not held liable for things which would be a crime for an adult. In a legal and literal sense, children have fewer rights and less individual agency than adults. They’re considered a different category of sentience. With different mental facilities, different rules are appropriate. There’s a whole scale ranging from a rock to a “galaxy brain” super-intelligence, and different things are appropriate for parts of the scale.
The same thing happens for adults sometimes too, for people with brain disorders or dementia. People who aren’t able to understand something aren’t capable of giving informed consent for it… and thus aren’t generally allowed to do those things. It’d be a crime for a bank to sign a baby up for a mortgage… and it probably should be a crime for Comcast to sign grandma up for a $300/month cable package when all she wants to do is check her email and watch the news.
Same here. I’ve spent my career making intellectual property … and giving most of it away under an open license. It’s weird how well that can work sometimes… and how badly things can turn out when people try to do the opposite.
With television shows, for example, there’s a big demand for streaming services which carry all the shows people are interested in. At first, Netflix provided this, and people were pretty happy. But over time, more and more companies divided the catalog into smaller and smaller islands and people ended up having to maintain like a dozen monthly subscriptions in order to get the shows they want. So a lot of people have been going back to what they did before Netflix, making their own solutions and sharing with each other.
This sort of thing happens far too often. It’s important to make sure one’s business model is fundamentally about helping people and giving them what they want, instead of fundamentally about restricting others for profit. And that’s a big reason why small companies and big companies are so different… small companies usually listen to people and focus on providing what people want. Big companies usually focus instead on protecting their position and finding ways to extract more money from the people, without much emphasis on actually listening or making the relationship mutually beneficial.
I’m going way off into tangents though, and should probably get back to my todo list.
That’s a hobby though. Same with me, my inventing is only a hobby. I am concerned dedicated progress only survives today in the form of hobbyists.
TK did say most of her career, which may imply she gets paid to develop coffee code that falls under various open source licenses.
Edit: How did I type coffee instead of code? I think I may have needed more coffee…
As well as negotiating the myriad of open-source licensing models - a much broader discussion that necessarily shouldn’t be addressed here due to staying on topic… talk about a to-do list…
However, the industry in your example (entertainment) relative to mfg industries do have similarities and issues in common (again a crazy long discussion). But the big difference as I’ve experienced them is that performing rights organizations have driven the entertainment industries (both film & music) for years via copyright extensions - something that doesn’t exist in the mfg industries, as patents are relatively short lived.
ok, ok… enough borderline off-topic… I’m just a noob lookin’ for a flashlight…
… no.
I do free software for a living. It’s not just a hobby. It’s an entire industry with its own ecosystem, on which most of the world’s tech infrastructure is based. As for me personally, I’ve focused mostly on Linux distros, and have been involved in about a dozen of them.
thank god for distro people…
as well, many don’t make the distinction between free software and compensation, as they are not the same thing…
DBCustom.
Dale…
“”“”If those that can’t afford it don’t have to save up to get one, he loses that sale. If thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of the clones are sold, that is very potentially food NOT put on his table. Arguably, food was put on other’s tables, off his design.“”“”“”
That’s fine BUT.
A lot of people can NOT and will never be able to afford such things.
(Facts of life) Unfortunately.
With the copy’s. We, the unwashed so to speak.
Have a chance of having. AND USING. a nice decent quality light/knife etc
of a nice design.
That otherwise we could only drool about.
SOME of us. do not nor ever will have the wherewithall.
Just Sell your products to those with the back pocket for such toys.
and please leave us not so flash persons to appreciate the lesser copies,
we otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to.
I live on $460AUD per week. Total. For food. Fuel. Insurances. Running costs of everything
and my $10 pw on the knives/torches.
I have reserves but most are spent now ready for me fading away to a jar of dust (78yrs)
A lot DON’T have that.
Regards.
Hasn’t anyone quoted John Ruskin yet?
There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.
—John Ruskin
Read more at Cheaper Quotes - BrainyQuote
Yeah, I sometimes forget that people read “free software” in the sense of “free as in beer”… when really it’s more “free as in speech”. It’s open, but that doesn’t mean people don’t get paid for it.
I haven’t looked into it much, but as I understand the Linux foundation is just funded by 1000’s of tech corporations collectively. These corporations pay hundreds of thousands each year to stay members, and in return they get to steer the ship. These corporations are huge names like Intel, ATT, IBM, Microsoft, Huawei, etc.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. I’m saying it’s different, but the same.
I would like to hear you describe it in your own words though TK.
Bring on the clones. If it works and doesn’t catch on fire for a lot cheaper than the real thing, then I’ll get ome! Impersonation is the highest form of flattery, right? There are some things I wouldn’t have unless it was a copy of the real thing.
^ Yeah, but at what real cost?
R&D: none
QC: mwah
CS: none
Waste bin: frequent
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
(1) Emisars are quite unique imo. Hank protects his design by more than competitive prices > no copycats.
(2) Surefire is innovative. They have patents. Try finding something like Intellibeam elsewhere > no copycats
(3) Some smaller US-based companies offer just high quality flashlights (that’s hearsay, I cannot afford premium US lights). If that’s true, I doubt mass production can ensure the same level of quality. There are knockoffs, but customers in both camps are different for sure. If I’m in for a $500 FL, I won’t go for a $50 FL just looking similar.
(4) If it is just about design: There are only so many ways to get it right. Copying something accidentally because that’s the obvious solution to a problem is imo absolutely ok. Can’t stand companies protecting obvious designs.
The free software ecosystem isn’t a membership sort of thing, because it’s not centralized. It’s millions of individual projects, all run differently. Linux itself is just one of those projects, albeit a pretty important one since a kernel is needed to run almost everything else. In the bigger picture though, people and companies find projects relevant to their needs, use them, and then often contribute back to those projects. If anyone wants to help steer the ship, so to speak, all they have to do is submit patches… or bug reports, or documentation, or even just join a relevant mailing list or forum and start talking.
Distros collect many of those projects in one place, packaging them together for convenience and consistency. This curated set then works together as an operating system, like Debian or Red Hat. Sometimes a single person can make a distro, if it’s small and fairly specialized… but for the full-featured ones it takes hundreds or thousands of people to do all the work involved in putting it together. The biggest ones are typically large enough that they have their own governance structures with elected officials in the key roles. They then organize thousands of workers, both paid and unpaid. And then on top of that, there are typically companies who focus on the more commercial and corporate aspects of it… like enterprise support, specialized development, B-to-B consulting, hardware enablement, etc.
One of the most well-known companies who does that is Red Hat, which has about 13,000 or 14,000 employees last I heard. They’re just one of many though. I haven’t actually worked at Red Hat, even though I’ve worked on Red Hat and they use some stuff I made.
Instead, I’ve spent more time with Debian-based distros like Ubuntu. To get an idea what the size of that is like, Debian currently has about 32,000 source packages or 70,000 binary packages. Back when it had less than 10,000, I knew what each and every package did. At this point though, that’s just not feasible any more.
The flashlight firmware repository is pretty small. It has only 947 commits so far, and about 36,000 lines of code according to sloccount. For comparison, the Linux kernel had 71,552 commits in 2017 alone, which consisted of 5.3 million lines of code added or removed. Microsoft Windows is estimated to have about 50 million lines of code, according to the most recent numbers I could find. The entire Debian project has about 1.3 billion lines of code.
As for what all that code and effort actually does, er, it does all sorts of things. Some of it runs common devices like phones, drones, dishwashers, and, of course, flashlights. Some of it is user-oriented applications like word processors, games, and photo editors. Some of it runs the internet, including both the backbone parts and the individual sites like BLF. Some free software even runs critical infrastructure like stock markets, air traffic systems, and power grids. Virtually the entire population of Earth depends on free software on a daily basis. It’s a sizable chunk of what keeps the world running.
So I wouldn’t really describe free software as a hobby. However, “hobby” is a fair description of the stuff I do with flashlights. I play with shiny things to entertain myself.
i want my next flashlight to have its own web site 
i mean with linux, a web server, wifi, https:/ all on the light
actually BLE is kind of cool, i almost bought one of those foursevens lights, but they never had an 18650 product, at least not that i liked
enough about me
linux lights!
wle
I agree with the guys here. As long as it’s clear the derivative is not the original, and does its own thing in one way or another, I’m cool with it and may even prefer the derivative. And if the original really is THAT good, I’ll find some way of getting it. Caveat emptor and all that.
Oh, and massive, massive thanks to sb for airing out the BS in this, the rotten stench was building up. It shall not be missed.
Suefire basically put 4sevens out of business, even though their lights were very different. But, a good legal team will do that to the competition. After 4sevens had to scrap their original designs, their new lights sucked and they quickly went bankrupt.
I’m not a fan of that kind of copyright enforcement. Protect a copy, sure. But when you abuse the patent system, you get no support from me. I’ll never buy a Suefire light. (Probably wouldn’t anyway, since they’re way overpriced and under-perform.)
For a long time of you wanted the top notch flashlight it was Mag lite or Surefire or Streamlight. They were all expensive with Surefire at the top. An entry-level light cost $80-$100 with top of the line reaching past $250. Ouch. That was a lot of $ for 1999. Around 2010 LEDs came into existence that were quickly surpassing incandescent lights from Mag lite, Surefire and Streamlight for around the same price. I remember the first Streamlight Stinger LED came with 500lm or 800lm. It was awesome and blew away the Mags. Then in around 2015 on the heels of better li-ion battery technology and driver IC’s the Orient stepped into our lives with low-cost lights that surpassed even top end Surefires and Mags and Streamlights for half the cost. Now we have lights costing $50 with the highest end led technology that puts Mag and Surefire to shame. Quality? It’s a a mixed-bag, but generally it’s good enough and of course you can always mod them if feasible.