Opensource engineering or draw a plugin for your machine

In my free time, various technical ideas swarm in my head. Sometimes stupid, sometimes quite nothing. A rather weighty part of them, after a year or more, finds fulfillment in life, often exactly in the way I imagined it.
I want to use this effect for "selfish purposes" and tell the community one more idea that would be extremely interesting to see in life.

There is one good way to give your project popularity and a long life - to make it a hobby subject. This has long been successfully tested in the software industry: API + SDK + community of free developers - and soon your children begin to babysit, as with their own, thousands of people, sparing no effort, time and often money.
It's not enough for people to just use it - people want to create!
You just have to regularly sell, maintain and update the core of the system, the community will do the rest for you.
Even better is open source. But I won’t go into this, because the article is not about software, but rather about the hardware itself.

Who said that opensource can only be in software?

Meanwhile, in industry today everything is exactly the opposite.
Each nut is carefully patented, the product is weighed with various TMs, like a war hero, with medals, and for making modifications to the product and even for simply opening its case, the manufacturer deprives you of warranty and exposes it to all kinds of ostracism.

Instead, one could do the following ...

Technical side

The developer and manufacturer of the product (let's call it the “Founder”) divides the design of its product (eg automobile) into a conditional core and environment.

The founder provides open access to the working drawings of the product, in which the core is an integral and indivisible unit having points of attachment, pairing and connection of devices and peripheral parts.
Templates for developing peripheral nodes are also provided.

Templates, in turn, have three categories of elements:

• “Red elements” are obligatory and inviolable elements that provide fastening and pairing with the core; they cannot be edited, removed, or moved.
• “Yellow elements” - optional elements that also cannot be edited, but which can be freely removed, replaced with others and moved - these are standardized interface nodes with other peripheral elements.
• "Green elements" is a space for free creativity, they can be edited as you like, within reason. The limits of the reasonable are the defined boundaries beyond which the part should not go.

For example, tuning a car, in the case of creating, say, aerodynamic dodgers, it may look like this:
the front bumper template has:

• "Red elements" - attachment points to the body and the interface line with the wing, hood, radiator.
• "Yellow elements" - slots for attaching fog lights.
• “Green elements” are the external aerodynamic contours of the bumper itself.

Organizational side

The free developer is registered on the Founder’s website, opens an account and gets access to download templates and design tools, as well as documentation on the necessary standards.
After the development of the node is completed, he sends his models and drawings to the Founder’s website, where a special script checks whether the integrity of the “red” and “yellow” elements in the drawing is preserved.

Further - with a certain periodicity, a commission is convened in the founder’s technical laboratory, which censors the submitted projects with technical, design and economic censorship. The commission determines which of the works will be allowed to be produced, in which something needs to be fixed, and which ones are generally worthless.
The free developer is notified of the results of this examination through a personal account and correspondence.

At the final stage, the developer is invited to participate in the testing of the pilot copy of the product.

Economic side

In case of a positive decision of the commission on the admission of development to production, an agreement is concluded between the Founder and the author, and its development is patented.

Projects approved for production fall into the list from which the final consumer can choose a suitable product package.

Thus, the development goes into free sale, the profit from which is divided in a certain proportion between the Founder and the author, according to the contract, and in addition the author gets the opportunity to order this item for free or at a big discount.

A scheme is also possible in which the author begins to receive deductions only after the proceeds from the sale of his product cover production costs. All this is stipulated in the contract.

Basic principles

Everything described above is still a very general and approximate idea, which needs analytical and legal “finishing”.

The main principles, in my opinion, are as follows:

• clear separation of the core and periphery in the product at the stage of its development
• A simple, understandable and most automated algorithm for the exchange of working drawings and other documents between the manufacturer and free authors, partly the idea can be borrowed from open source communities for software.
• A simple and understandable model of economic relations between producers and authors.
• mechanism for the sale of the final product, which involves the choice of its configuration by the buyer. This is the most difficult moment in terms of sales planning. As everyone knows, in a restaurant they bring food in advance much faster ...
• "split guarantee" policy, analogous to the "main + universe" demarcation in Linux Ubuntu components
• simplified and accelerated procedure for patenting peripheral parts.

Free developers can be both individuals and companies, for example, design studios.
In the latter case, I suspect that this can be very much in demand. For example, a manufacturer of household appliances is developing the core of the system - the engine, drive and brains of the washing machine, and free developers create many options for its appearance, write various improvements to the firmware, etc. ...

That's all. I hope something like this someday sees the light of day.

If you know that somewhere it already works successfully - tell us, it will be very interesting to study their experience.