Open Photowebs
A photographic Adafruit
Companies like Adafruit and Smartduino are innovators on two levels: not only do they offer innovative components and the open source software to go with them, they are the purveyors of a new type of business model adapted to the realities of globalization in an information age.
By far the biggest obstacle to getting the Photowebs Modular System Camera to market is the legalese associated with making a propitiatory version of this system camera.
A crowd funding goal of over half a million dollars, where the near totality of the raised funds go to a conglomerate of corporate lawyers, is unreasonable and based on the average funding goals for projects of this type, will be difficult to attain under the best of circumstances.
Even with the necessary funds, be it through crowd funding or private equity, the time it will take for another company to copy the design and bypass the original patents, is today measured in days and not years. Enforcing these patents would raise the total cost of the original budget by several orders of magnitude.
This is where small businesses like Smartduino have got it right. Their business model is based on helping themselves and their customers prosper, and not a group of third party corporate lawyers. Not only is the software to run their products open source but the hardware itself is also open source. They make a profit by being the first to offer a particular component and by ensuring the continued improvement of existing products. And since they are the inventors, they have a head start at making the best version of a particular component even when an other company uses their open source designs to make a competing version of the same product.
The advent of LinxCNC and of quality 3D printers at a reasonable price, have made it possible for small businesses to start-up and succeed using an open software/open hardware business model.
This is the business model I am hoping to apply to The SLD Project. If I can reach a crowd funding goal of $50 000.00 for the Proof of Concept phase of this project, I will have sufficient funds to apply an open source/open hardware business model for the Photowebs Modular System Camera.
I will then be able to submit a feasible and professionally prepared project to an established crowd funding website to obtain the necessary funding for the production and distribution phase of this project.