Could you expound on this? In my mind there must ultimately be a manufacturer of a given product. Even if there was a completely open source blender, for example, manufacturers would be incentivized to make it in such a way that it still breaks, unlike code where there is no factory and no resources being spent after the design (code) is finished.
Open source and open spec parts can be manufactured by anyone with a jigsaw, 3d printer, cnc machine, etc. You could walk into a maker space with $100 worth of materials and walk out with a repairable, maintainable blender or whatever that will last your lifetime, and your kids' lifetimes.
I was going to make a note in my first post about 3d printing but I forgot. In my opinion 3d printing cannot be a solution until metal 3d printing is cheap. For the blender example, do you really want to use a handmade blender consisting of a hacked together motor, blade, and glass? this seems like a recipe for disaster. For things that are 100% plastic, ie. basically the only type of thing a 3d printer can reliably produce, even then with required knowledge, planned obsolescence is less of an issue already. Plastic goods are either throw-away or durable enough for what they are (eg. a hairbrush).
With regards to the cnc machine, yes it is more doable, but now with more time, money and knowledge required. Open source appliances are definitely not bad -- I can't imagine a downside to them -- but they can't do the same thing that open source software does.
"For things that are 100% plastic, ie. basically the only type of thing a 3d printer can reliably produce"
This is nowhere remotely near true. I've been testing SLS-printed diamond blades and coring bits for two years, now. They work just fine, and last longer than their stamped/brazed equivalents.
I may be living in the past in this aspect. I admit my statement earlier that only plastic being printed reasonably may be wrong. I don't know what SLS is, but I briefly looked it up and it looks like the cheapest ones are more than $5,000, with the larger ones being hundreds of thousands. There may be cheaper options that I didn't see. in any event that may not be an issue if only specialized people use them, and others can buy parts from them locally or online. Would you mind sharing more about what SLS printing is and what it can do? Can I print real appliances with it such as a microwave or blender? Do you see the cost as being reasonable or would it simply be paying more for guaranteed quality? For context I tried searching for what SLS is made of but it seems like it a process and not a material. Can this process be used for metal? If it can only print diamond than I don't think it could be used for appliances. I also found this result which just lead me to more confusion:
>The two most common powder bed fusion 3D printing systems today are plastic-based, commonly referred to as SLS, and metal-based, known as direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) or selective laser melting (SLM).
Selective LASER Sintering/melting is a form of powder bed deposition printing. You get materials in a powder form (usually thermoplastics, but there are metal versions used in heavy industry) and hit them with a LASER to fuse them together. It is an additive form of fabrication. You can print most of the parts you'd need for something like a blender or microwave, structurally-speaking. You'd not be printing the actual hardware components like the magnets for a motor, nor would you be printing diamond, as you need way more than a LASER to make that happen. You could print the regular non-PCB wiring with powdered copper filler. The cost is not quite reasonable for wanting to work with metal those machines get pricey due to the extremely high-powered LASERs required.
I just buy SLS-printed diamond-embedded lapidary blades and use them. They're metal, with 10mm segments of diamond-embedded metal at the rims.
I apologize for what I see as some confusion caused in my wording - diamond itself isn't the blade. It's the abrasive sintered-in with a powdered metal. You basically mix the two together and hit it with a laser to fuse it all together.
> Open source appliances [...] can't do the same thing that open source software does.
People don't write their own open source. Expertise and economies of scale are a thing. I'm fine with buying my open source appliance from Walmart, as long as I can get parts from everywhere and download a manual that tells me how to fix everything that goes wrong with it.
>People don't write their own open source. Expertise and economies of scale are a thing.
True, people don't write their open source, but what distinguishes open code from open blueprints is that in software the plan, ie. the source code is the product, only in binary form, where with an open blueprint or schematic the product is only defined by the plans. The point being that having a good plan cannot ensure a good end device, especially if the opposite is incentivized.
>I'm fine with buying my open source appliance from Walmart, as long as I can get parts from everywhere
This assumes that the parts from everywhere are not themselves low quality, which may be a fair assumption since they are parts not a product. But if this becomes feasible, and the manufacturers are indeed incentivized to make broken products, they will may not produce open source products at all rendering the existence of open source plans useless, although the OP assumed the existence already. So yes in the event that we did have open source appliances planned obsolescence might be solved or reduced by your method, but the fact that planned obsolescence exists in the first place is a signal that manufacturers will never produce them if this is the case. It is then in effect almost (in this regard) the same as the OP saying "I wish manufactures would not implement planned obsolescence." A potential solution for the manufacturer would be to simply make the most expensive part be the most the one that breaks, or even better to pull an apple and solder everything together such that you can't ever fix it. Even if the latest apple laptops were completely open source you wouldn't be able to upgrade many aspects of it. My point here is that if we start from the point of assuming manufactures will implement planned obsolescence then they will continue using it. Which is why the GP suggested that via 3d printing the user become the manufacturer or to do so with small scale manufacturing, which as I pointed out comes with increased cost and safety concerns.
>and download a manual that tells me how to fix everything that goes wrong with it.
Open source doesn't automatically suggest a manual and closed source doesn't automatically suggest no manual (as someone else pointed out, manuals used to be more common). That said, the chances of there being a manual for an open source appliance are probably very high if there are enough users or if the creators cared to document it. And of course if you can read the source than open source in fact does imply a manual, but at greater cost (which still is better than nothing of course). Either way I think my above point stands that if we assume manufacturers are implementing planned obsolescence (which the OP assumes) and if we assume that open source would solve planned obsolescence, then we have no choice but to conclude that no manufactures will make open source products. The exception being if its so difficult that only a small number of users will actually be able to repair the product or could only do so at a high cost. In which case there would be a small segment of people who would benefit. But that severely limits the statement of the OP, which is totally fine, just something to take note of.
Could you expound on this point? I don't think there is any appliance that is made only of metal that has planned obsolescence. For example a cheese greater I would expect to last forever as long as you don't buy a really cheap one, but that I feel is inevitable. and I'm sure there are people selling hand made cheese graters. In any event what I meant by household appliance and what I assumed OP meant was something like a blender, a microwave, or a washing machine. Just forging metal isn't going to cut it with these products. perhaps my language was bit harsh earlier but what else is there to say? I'm sure there are many talented people who can do this but I'd imagine they would be doing something more productive. Even if not, there is no guarantee on the quality, even if it's open source, as it still has to be manufactured. This seems like microwave gatcha to me, a game I'd rather not play.
>Handmade does not mean "hacked together". Airplanes are handmade. My dinner is handmade.
In my view you are defining two types of handmade here. Dinner can be handmade of course, but from an evolutionary perspective this is necessarily true. I would put this into its own category given how fundamental it is. But aside from that, just from a basic perspective, dinner is very simple to make, and the ingredients are standardized by nature itself; that is, there cannot be any incompatibility between two foods. So the parts are extremely simple and the building process even simpler. And there are minimal safety concerns. Although from a quick search I found the following:
>CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States.
I don't know what to conclude from this, but it doesn't matter anyway. The reason being that we cannot compare making dinner to making a blender. This is obvious from my evolutionary perspective given above but also from direct observation. The ingredients of a blender are much more specialized. Size matters, quality matters, and it all has to fit together. I'd compare it to a Linux based OS actually. Most people need someone to package all the utilities together (and provide support, but lets ignore that). Except hardware of course does not scale in this way. You need to repeat the process each time. The is the problem that factories solve: securing supply, putting it together, and all this at scale. In regards to the airplane example, the definition of handmade is vastly changed, or at least the type of handmade has changed. Now there are government regulators, extremely specific and expensive machines (some of which I assume are in house), highly skilled engineers and billions of dollars at work. The only reason we aren't using factories is because we can't (I'm taking your word for it, I don't know). Unless you are referring to smaller planes, which maybe don't have all this involved (I don't know anything about this either). But at the very least they have a few skilled engineers and a lot of tools. We can't use these engineers to make blenders and washing machines, it just cannot scale. There need to be billions of these things. Maybe a few thousand can afford this, but now we have lost our engineers to less important problems.
This said, you never directly suggested we do this at scale. Only that you would like if possible.
Think about it like your old style steel frame 1-3 speed or 10 speed bicycle (pre big box versions).
If every part is standardized to the point of commodification (competing exclusively on price and quality) and it's assembled by a local store whose asset is their reputation, then it becomes hard to defect on any given part because it will just get swapped out.
Similarly if our open source blender is made of 'electric motor' and 'belt' and 'brass gears' and it will be repaired rather than causing a repeat customer when it breaks, then the nash equilibrium becomes producing an okay product for a decent price, not a mostly-good one for the same price which will break.
Open schematics for electronics, parts blueprints for mechanical components. Anything with code/firmware should also have open sourced code with related toolchain to program it either freely available or open sourced too.
This is not that hard to do, a lot of older appliances already do it all.
Of course having the plans is great. I wish all information was free. My point is that planned obsolescence, assuming it exists (which I do) can only be solved by the manufacturer. Even if we make an open source blueprint for a given appliance, It will not stop the manufacturer from modifying the blueprint by using cheaper materials or otherwise ensuring that the device breaks in x years. The only relevance open source blueprints has that I can see to planned obsolescence is that is lowers the barrier of entry to making a product, thereby increasing competition and somehow making it easier to make quality products. I can't save for sure, but I would assume the largest barrier is building and scaling the factory, not the blueprints. The manufacturer ultimately has the last say here.
One solution is the hire a factory to build the product to spec. Here we can deal with planned obsolescence by raising consumer awareness about a given blueprint, so that they know to buy the right spec. That sounds a lot like HDMI, which has no shortage of low quality implementations. now that's not a perfect comparison because HDMI is only one part of the cable and I don't know how much needs to be verified to qualify but ignoring that there is another issue of simply uncertified products altogether taking advantage of the name to sell worse quality products. And this leads me to my last point which is that it may not be feasible to have a standard like HDMI for appliances like a blender. The reason HDMI exists at all is not because of quality per se but because devices need to work together. So what results of this in my opinion is that there are a lot of (too many?) prerequisites to solving planned obsolescence, definitely more than just publishing the plans.
If parts and designs are standardized, if your particular manufacturer has skimped on a part, you could replace just that part with an identically specced one from another manufacturer.
edit: And I don't mean that everyone uses the same type of clothes iron, I mean that the type of clothes iron you use isn't tied to a particular manufacturer.
The idea is for the design to be repairable and the plans available. These can specify materials as well as shapes etc. Basically, if it needs to be specified to meet a level of performance, it can be so specified.
In terms of mass sales, yes a manufacturer would have to make it. But multiple manufacturers could and they may not "cheap out for obsolescence sake" in the same way. And if they do, a person has the option to make it themselves - whether or not it makes economic sense.
This is still better than the current situation where the customer has to pay money, cross fingers and hope.
