Clones: How to get your “pirates” to work for you by Xenobyte

Found this blog on Opensat4all.com from Xenobyte . Interesting enough for a copy and paste. Original can be found HERE. 

Enjoy reading!

I am working on a new hobby, i bought an Ultimaker 3D printer. With this you get a lot of new options you can do. I am working on more posts about that, so watch my blog for more info 

The last few days I saw on the forum a discussion about clones. Everyone reacts disgusted. And mostly that first reaction is OK, but not always clones are bad.

When i was working with my 3D printer I got introduced to a very nice book: Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. In this book Chris Anderson takes us through the new business way of working. In one chapter he also tells about his own experience he had when one of his open source projects gets cloned:

How to get your “pirates” to work for you:

Here’s an example of how it works in practice: In late 2010, someone posted on the DIY Drones site that Chinese copies of our ArduPilot Mega design were for sale on Taobao, eBay, and other online market- places. And indeed they were: well-produced, fully functional clones. Not only that, but our English instruction manual had been translated into Chinese, too, along with some of the software.

Our community members were shocked by this blatant “piracy” and asked what we were going to do about it.

Nothing, I said.

This is both expected and encouraged in open-source hardware. Software, which costs nothing to distribute, is free. Hardware, which is expensive to make, is priced at the minimum necessary to ensure the healthy growth of a sustainable business to ensure quality, sup- port, and availability of the products, but the designs are given away free, too. All intellectual property is open, so the community can use it, improve it, make their own variants, etc.
The possibility that others would clone the products is built into the model. It’s specifically allowed by our open-source license. Ideally, people would change/improve the products (“derivative designs”) to address market needs that they perceive and we have not addressed. That’s the sort of innovation that open source is designed to promote. But if they only clone the products and sell them at lower prices, that’s okay, too. The marketplace will decide.

By the way, the Arduino development boards have gone through exactly the same situation, with many Chinese cloners. The clones were sometimes of lower quality, but even when they were good, most people continued to support the official Arduino products and the developers who created them. Today clones have a small share of the market, mostly in very price-sensitive markets such as China. And frankly, being able to reach a lower-price market is a form of innova- tion, too, and that is no bad thing.
Personally, I’m delighted to see this development, for four reasons:

• I think it’s great that people have translated the wiki into Chi- nese, which makes it accessible to more people.
• It’s a sign of success—you only get cloned if you’re making something people want.
• Competition is good.
• What starts as clones may eventually become real innovation and improvements. Remember that our license requires that any de- rivative designs must also be open-source. Think how great would it be if a Chinese team created a better design than ours. Then we could turn the tables and produce their design, translating the documentation into English and making them available to a market outside China. Everybody wins! (Hey, a guy can dream ;-) )

Shortly after I wrote this, a member named “Hazy” responded in the comments that he had been working with the team that had made the boards, and was the one doing the translation. I complimented him on the speed at which it had been done, and then asked him if he’d consider porting to the translation to be part of our official manual, which takes the form of a wiki on Google Code, where our repository is. He agreed to do so, and so I gave him edit permission to the wiki and otherwise set it up for a parallel Chinese translation that users could select.

At the time, we were using the Subversion version-control system (we’re now using Git), and Google Code had a relatively basic implementation of it. The wiki pages were just files in the same repository as the source code for our autopilots, and I hadn’t investigated the permissions options very well. To let people edit the wiki, I just gave them blanket “commit” access (the ability to create and edit files) to the whole repository.
When I gave community members such access, I usually asked them not to mess with the code by mistake (membership in the code development teams was more exclusive, because the danger of messing things up was higher), but in the case of Hazy I forgot.
The first thing Hazy did was integrate the Chinese translation of the manual seamlessly, so users could simply click a link to switch easily between the two languages.
Then, because he was an expert in our autopilot (he had, after all, been part of the team that cloned it), he started making corrections in the English manual as well. I could see all the commits flowing by and approved them all: they were smart, correct, and written in perfect English.
Then it got interesting: Hazy started fixing bugs in the code itself. The first time this happened, I assumed he’d made a mistake and pushed a wiki file into the wrong folder. But I checked it out, and it was code and his fix was not only correct, but properly documented. Who knew that Hazy was a programmer, too?!
I thanked him for the fix, and thought little more of it. But then the code commits kept coming. Hazy was working his way through our Issues list, picking off bugs one after another that the dev team had been too busy to handle themselves.

Today he is one of our best dev team members. I’ve still never met him, but after a while I asked him a bit about himself.
His real name is Xiaojiang Huang. He lives in Beijing, and by day he is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Peking University.
He told me his story:When I was a kid, I was fascinated by all kinds of models, and I wished I could have an RC plane. Several years later, I was able to afford an RC helicopter when I graduated from college. I also got RC trucks and planes. Sometimes I am derided as naïve for playing with “toys,” but I’m happy because it’s my childhood dream. I met ArduPilot by chance when I was surfing the Web, and was attracted by its powerful functions. Some friends of mine were also interested in it, but they felt a little inconvenient because of the English documents. So I tried to translate them into Chinese, hoping to reduce the difficulty of playing with ArduPilot for the Chinese fans. Thank you for the great work of DIY Drones, and I hope it will help more people make their dreams come true.

What happened there is magical. When we first got word of the cloned boards, some in our community initially jumped to the conclusion that this was another case of blatant Chinese piracy and wanted to know when we were going to sue. But when I reminded them that this was not a “pirated” version, but instead a “derivative design” fully permitted and even encouraged by our open-source license, the tenor changed.
Because we did not demonize the Chinese team, but instead treated them as part of the community, they acted that way, too. Hazy stepped forward and, rather than just exploiting our work, contributed to it as well.

So now at least some of the “pirates” work for us. Instead of just using our technology, they’re helping us to improve the technology for everyone. “Hazy” realized his dreams, and in doing so helped us realize ours, too.

I can really encourage all of you to read this book. It will show you the world around us is changing. The economy is changing, the way we buy our products, the way we look at our products, and the way we use them.

In his case an open source hardware device was being cloned. On the forum the talk was about commercial boxes being cloned. Box manufactures earn money is by selling boxes, they don't earn any money after a box is being sold unless the customer sells a second one.

The customer will only buy a second device if the first device worked correctly and he or she gets an good feeling. The feeling is also in the experience the customer gets when there are problems, how is it solved? How fast is it fixed. This is very important, but for the manufacturer it does not give any more money.

Unless the happy customers tells all his or her friends about the great experience he or she had. Then you create a community, which will promote your product for you. It is very imported to keep your happy customers happy  So to come back to the topic on Opensat4all: I also dont think that we need to give the clone boxes that much attention. Lets just create a nice software which runs perfect to give the end users a nice warm feeling inside, then people will still buy original boxes.

And who knows perhaps we also will get help from our clone friends... 

Ps the sheep above is Dolly, the first cloned animal