Hackronym: open engineering and entrepreneurship for the masses

The premise: To engineer is human. All humans should have access to space and tools with which to hack, and the ability to put themselves in a position where they don't have to worry about making money and can spend their time on helping people instead. A lot of great inventions are out there, but it's a hassle to make and sell physical things, so they don't get made or sold. We can fix this.

The idea: A space where inventors can create their own online stores - for free - to sell the things they invent without having to worry about things like manufacturing, shipping, and payment processing. Upload your designs and documentation, and if it's something we can manufacture, we'll automatically manufacture and drop-ship it for you; you control your prices and profits beyond a base manufacturing cost (which depends on the individual product being made). Think cafepress for things-that-aren't-tshirts. We'll start with custom-print and drop-ship blueprints, manuals, and illustrative DVDs for all projects - and custom-manufacture and drop-ship anything from components all the way up to fully assembled and packaged working products for whatever we can. This allows us to slowly grow our manufacturing capabilities.

The catch: Everything in your store has to be released under an open license or into the public domain. (We'll need to legally define what this means at some point, but for now assume creative commons - and all documentation and manufacturing instructions must be freely available; if they give hackronym enough information to build the thing, they give anyone enough information to build the thing.)

Other plans

 
hackronym.txt · Last modified: 2007/09/07 00:09 by root