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Hi Rich, Graham and all! Yesterday Rich Walker wrote:
Your argument implies that manufacture is only possible if there is monopoly? If that is true, then there is really no hope for any free/opensource development of anything that can be manufactured... :-(No; rather that if you want to, under present economic structures, begin to manufacture something novel, for which a large investment will ahve to be made before a return starts, the investor will need to be convinced that such a return is possible. The presence of patents on the device is one way to make that case; it also makes the *other* case, that no-one else is going to torpedo the process with a patent when the investment has been made.
Let's put aside the destructive use of patents you are pointing to for a moment. On Graham's / Christof's workshop on our last conference the concept of Lohnfertigung (industrial production for a third party - don't know the English term yet) was mentioned. A manufacturer who only materializes designs on his machines may get payed for the raw materials as well as for the work put into the actual manufacturing. The design, however, comes from a third party which may have put it under a Free license. Of course this would be only possible for highly standardized manufacturing technologies. However, theses manufacturing technologies are already reality to an interestingly high degree (rapid prototyping being the main term here) bringing enormous flexibility. I think the difference here is, that for starting the manufacturing it is not necessary to make a substantial investment into new manufacturing plants. The Lohnfertiger simply has the machines and the interesting thing of the manufacturing aspect is fully contained in the design. However, we discussed it as a chance for having more Free material projects. From your point of view it would mean to restrict the access to the design because then you can't make money from the exclusive advantage of having the machinery to manufacture the product :-( . Mit Freien Grüßen Stefan _______________________ http://www.oekonux.org/
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