Re: [DIYbio] O'Reilly BioHacker Issue 4: Open Source Biotech Consumables

On 11/29/2014 12:33 PM, Cathal (Phone) wrote:
> However, there's little (compared to equipment) money or excitement
> in open source platforms. I know: I tried!
> There's a great core community
> (here!) who create and support openness, but outside that core are
> people who just want features and don't care if it's theirs to hack or not.

Not caring if it's open is the mainstream of scientists -- they operate on
as high an abstraction level as they can, because that's what their jobs
demand, so yes, "scientists need money, too".

Mainstream in this context is the 99% of them with jobs. The rest of the planet
is the bigger mainstream, for which science is a niche market. So, there
are high prices for equipment and supplies. I'm working on developing
some gear that is up to the minute enough, and convenient enough
to be a tool for maybe a third of those 99% job holding scientists and
still is open source/open-hardware. I'm OK with copycats taking away
the initial idea in about 3 years, since I come up with new all the time
and the 3 year sales flow will pay for development if you're careful.
Patent danger does not go away for 20 years, so I may have to drop some
design chunks and redevelop them to be non-patent-infringing -- or drop that product...

The life cycles of open-hardware products is not well known yet, but there are some
that last a while. They have to be more than a break out board to last.
I'm going to find out if a complex system that can have features added
still sells in version 2, 3, 4 after the initial hard-to-copy-cat phase.

The evil mad science eggbot is selling still, and demonstrates this
kind of product life cycle is possible. The wiki page for using it
has been accessed 208,455 times.

The core to all my open equipment design thinking is to keep the IP
chunks really close to old patent-expired tech and the innovation
is in using chips and combinations, which will trigger less
patent problems than new science. To really open-hardware some
reagents may require using the patent system to own it, then
contractually releasing it as the owner.

Like Bryan said. And like Josh said about designing around patent research.

Josh: Are you giving patent research lessons these days?

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