They can't though. Because if it was really open source, then another firm could just sell if for $3. Of course fabrication itself complicates things, but the gist remains.
Yeah. For a basic keyboard/mouse, I wouldn't hesitate to pay $30 more for the "official" product. I wouldn't pay $100 more, but for it seems like there's a huge opportunity:
* Most mice on Aliexpress sell for $3 or so. I don't know the margin, but it's less than $3.
* I can't imaging anyone would hesitate to pay $5 more, and I wouldn't mind $30 more.
So yeah, off-brand could compete, and I'm sure students might buy it, but I think on-brand would do better.
And in either case, it wouldn't hurt. The $3 Aliexpress mouse vendors don't have any real IP moat. This is commodity tech.
That is true. And interesting to see how the value of retailer-brands relative to manufacturer-brands shift. I'm finding buying a no-name product from a retailer I trust to vet their goods. When buying from an open-online-marketplace-platform I really want to buy from a trusted brand to ensure quality.
Then the competitor couldn't just take the exact design and replicate it at a lower margin than the designer. Removing allowable commercial terms makes it significantly less "open" though, to that extent that many would argue it isn't open at all, like the various "shared source" approaches commercial software uses.
Another interesting approach would be something like the GPL, which I don't think is often used in hardware. Allow your competitors to use your design ... they just must contribute back improvements. Probably the incentives are wrong for this, but maybe not, it sorta seems like a bunch of the "no-name" chinese consumer goods operate like this. The produces are easy enough to reverse engineer that every just copies the basic idea and produces their own variants. This of course doesn't keep the inventor in an advantaged position, but at least keeps them competitive.
You can argue anything you like, black is white, the sky isn't blue, corporate exceptions mean it isn't "open at all" - but it clearly is at least more open then other than totally closed designs. If open means total freedom, including selling on at a lower margin; then yes, people might do express that freedom and undercut you - I can't see any way around that by definition, but I also don't see it as a problem - what's value is lost exactly?
I think what is a problem is that people can't use a subset of you design to make their own stuff. Maybe the solution to that is a common library of totally free design-pattern, but that still requires integration into a finished product?
> Allow your competitors to use your design ... they just must contribute back improvements.
won't this just lead to trivial improvements? perhaps a bug bounty, or similar, would be better? or even licensing the original design for either a set fee, or a %?
Oh sure, I'm actually in favor of these kinds of licenses. I mean, one way to think of them are GPL for commercial competitors and Apache/Mit/lgpl for "private" use (where private includes commercial, but not direct sales of of the product, such as using a DB and forking it for some kind of customization, the saas service using the DB doesn't compete with the DB vendor). All all cases there is some version of "open-ness," even OSI defined openness.
