On the contrary. If, as you say, Arc and Grid are so unique as to really surpass every other rotary and grid-based controller out there - which I don’t necessarily doubt - I think it could be a huge service to the community to open source them. As I mentioned, this is entirely @tehn’s decision, and I fully respect it; but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that open sourcing something isn’t just giving the world a license to manufacture bad duplicates. That is inevitable, of course, as we see with Mutable clones, Arduino derivatives, et cetera.
But, similarly, it drives innovation. Much like the original vision of the patent system, an open source piece of hardware can both remain the pinnacle of its category and become the basis of an entirely new one.
As @LT6J so beautifully puts it:
No comparison to the original one which feels just amazing. Also the leds are so beautiful on the original grid. A beautiful warm glow… mesmerising.
What I want to say is that when you buy such a product it kind of is a piece of art itself.
Undoubtedly, this is a distinction that comes only from the genuine love and care put in during not just design, but also assembly and quality assurance.
That said, @LT6J also points out that an open source Grid would put in the community’s hands the solution to some other problems:
I don’t say this to argue that these items should be released as open source - they’re not, that’s fine - but to make another point. While it’s true that I could make something similar, but much less polished, based on the NeoTrellis or some other existing hardware, or roll my own grid entirely, this statement:
isn’t quite right! True, rolling my own from scratch might allow me to alter the basic assumptions of the device, but in the case of the Grid, releasing it as an open-source platform from which to build additional instruments could launch an ecosystem of new hardware, and especially software. How much easier to take @tehn’s wonderful design and add MIDI, or multicoloration, or wireless capability, or a hundred other things, than to build a grid from scratch? How much duplicated effort saved?
See, for instance, the Pique and CV controller thereof, a variant of Peaks which, in my opinion, improves in some areas and fails in others, but is, overall, much more suited for my use case. It’s not as simple as “Pique is a smaller, cheaper Peaks” - it has new functionality and an altered use case entirely.
So, while I want to be clear that I am just using the Grid as an example here and am not trying to argue with @tehn’s decision not to release the design, I do think that it’s important to recognize that open sourcing a hardware design is more than giving people a license to make knock-offs.
